[T] he Vought CFPB[] . . . . has quietly made a series of moves that would enable an unholy alliance of Big Tech and financial institutions to digitally discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion, or gender. If Vought gets his way, there will be little to stop the tech-finance nexus from using and exploiting its massive troves of personal data to unleash a torrent of surveillance pricing in credit markets and turbocharge modern day redlining.
Meanwhile, NCLC’s Chi Chi Wu has published Recent credit score drops come from Donald Trump’s bad policy in the Chicago Tribune. Here’s an excerpt:
Millions of Americans recently saw their credit scores drop 100 or 150 points, moving them into “subprime” borrower status and possibly shutting them out of affordable credit, decent rental housing, good insurance rates and even some jobs. What happened to devastate the credit records of 2.4 million Americans, with likely tens of millions more to come? The administration of Donald Trump started reporting student loan delinquencies to the credit bureaus.
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[S]tudent loan borrowers were encouraged by society to borrow to get an education and better their lives; they were promised programs to help manage their loans that were subsequently blocked, that the Trump administration has failed to provide access to and that bills in Congress are seeking to diminish even further. Barely 1 in 3 student loan borrowers are making regular monthly payments. That’s a sign of a systemic and societal problem, not individual irresponsible behavior by 7 million people.
Americans should not be shut out from future economic opportunities because of policy changes by the economic wrecking ball of the current administration. * * *
