Guest post by Stephen Raher Each year, over 12 million people are released from jails and prisons in the United States. When this happens, the correctional facility often owes money to the person being released. This could be money that the person earned while incarcerated, gifts from family, or perhaps funds that a person had they were […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
In the Credit CARD Act of 2009 Congress sought to tame what it viewed as excesses of the credit-card industry. Go here to view the Act's basic reforms. Since the law went into effect about five years ago, commentators and researchers have tried to assess its effectiveness. Read our prior posts on the topic here, here, here, here, […]
As our readers know, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just issued its DoddFrank-mandated study on consumer arbitration. The CFPB has announced that on Thursday, April 2, 2015, it will conduct a "roundtable" on the topic. If you want to attend you must RSVP by sending an email to communityaffairs@cfpb.gov. The roundtable will take place at […]
Many posts on this blog have noted the difficulty in achieving consumer protection through disclosure (including disclosure through product labeling). If that interests you, you may want to read Science-Based Food Labels: Improving Regulations and Preventing Consumer Deception Through Limited Information Disclosure Requirements by Joshua Dhyani. (Note that, at page 33, Dhyani's piece prominently displays […]
That's the name of this article by Peter Whoriskey. Note in particular the long list of "unnatural" ingredients at the end of the article that find their way into foods advertised as "natural." [HT to Michele Simon]
Go here, here, here, and here.
This article by Max Ehrenfreund and Sandhya Somashekhar explains that, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report, the Affordable Care Act is costing taxpayers less than expected because of lower medical spending costs, which in turn will reduce the expected cost of insurance premiums, which in turn will lower the amount the government spends […]
Read the agency's fact sheet and the full report. Here's what the CFPB had to say about its study: Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a study indicating that arbitration agreements restrict consumers’ relief for disputes with financial service providers by limiting class actions. The report found that, in the consumer finance markets studied, […]
About a year ago, we posted about the electric-car company Tesla, which wants to sell cars directly from its stores to consumers, and efforts by car dealers to interfere with Tesla's business model on, you guessed it, consumer-protection grounds. Our earlier post dealt in particular with Tesla's difficulties selling its cars in New Jersey. Now, […]