"Matthew Lee" is a public interest lawyer, author, and founder of two non-profit organizations, Inner City Press and Fair Finance Watch.

Both are known for their investigations of the banking industry's treatment of low-income communities of color around the world. Lee produces weekly reports on, and advocates concerning, such global banks as HSBC, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland, Mizuho Financial Group/Mizuho, and others.

In 2005-2006, Lee was engaged in litigation to deem the "citizens-only" provision of the Freedom of Information Act of Delaware to be unconstitutional.

Lee and Fair Finance Watch in October 2013 raised fair lending concerns regarding Mercantile Bank and its proposed acquiring of FirstBank. On November 26, 2013, Michigan Live reported on the challenge and Mercantile telling the Security & Exchange Commission the issues Lee and FFW raised would result in a delay of the merger.

Lee is the author of the non-fiction book Predatory Lending: Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City and the novel Predatory Bender. Lee is also an accredited journalist at the United Nations.

More Matthew Lee on Wikipedia.

We worked real hard tonight. We got back when we needed to and helped out on defense, then we generated the attack and got the ball to the forwards.

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We've never done it before. Now, we have the chance.

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The time has come to look at whether New York banking has become anti-competitive. A merger of this size is something that low-income neighborhoods cannot afford. We've had more than enough.

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Home playoff games are a lot of fun with the big crowds. Now, we've just got to make sure we keep playing the way we need to play, make sure we stay on track.

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It's a bad deal for community lending. We've looked at Sovereign's existing lending in the market - from Philadelphia to Boston - and we found that in all of the markets we've looked at they disproportionately deny credit to people of color, African Americans and Latinos. Where credit is granted, they are much more likely to impose higher costs on people of color.

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It's a practice that clearly injures people. This is a vulnerable population that I think believes if they pay back these loans they're getting somewhere. This is a predatory practice. You really are confining someone.

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This is a place to escape. You're escaping the everyday rigors of life.

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You make more money gouging -- that's the problem. For strictly economic reasons, even with guidance and speeches by regulators, they're still not going to do it.

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It's a good feeling because you know you have the momentum. It gets everybody fired up, and you feel like you've got a good shot to go on and play well from there.

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