Those are topics of continuing concern to consumer advocates and the title of this paper by Sean Brian. Here is the abstract: In the last few years, store gift certificates have matured into a diverse set of products including "open loop" prepaid cards capable of providing services traditionally reserved to banks. At the same time, […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
Read this article by Kate Cox.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced yesterday that it has sued ITT Educational Services, Inc., accusing the for-profit college chain of predatory student lending. We believe that ITT used high-pressure tactics to push many students into expensive private student loans that were likely to end in default. This is our first public enforcement action against […]
Those are the topics considered in law teacher Joseph Singer's new article Foreclosure and the Failures of Formality, or Subprime Mortgage Conundrums and How to Fix Them. Start with the abstract: The subprime mortgage crisis was not only an economic disaster but posed challenges to traditional rules of property law. Banks helped create the crisis […]
That's the topic of Why Who Does What Matters: Governmental Design, Agency Performance, the CFPB and PPACA by law teachers David Hyman and William Kovacic. Here's the abstract: How should the federal government be organized – and who (i.e., which departments, agencies, bureaus, and commissions) should do what? The issue is not new: President James […]
The Real News Network has produced Will a $10 Minimum Wage Get All Working Americans Out of Poverty? As its title suggests, RNN's story addresses whether President Obama and the Democratic party's proposal to take the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour will provide a non-poverty-level wage. To watch the story, you can click on […]
We have covered extensively (for instance, here, here, and here) the ban on the sale of large, sugary drinks by New York City's health department. A state-law-based challenge to the ban by merchants and others succeeded in a New York trial court and an intermediate court of appeals. But last October New York's highest court […]
by Brian Wolfman The popular "cloud" storage service Dropbox has added a forced, pre-dispute arbitration clause to its standard consumer contract. As explained by Adam Levitin over at Credit Slips, Dropbox's clause also bans class actions, both in court and in arbitration. What I like about Levitin's post is that it stresses that the problem with […]
The Federal Reserve just issued its most recent quarterly report on household debt and credit. Though it reviews household debt and credit of all sorts, I was interested in what it had to say about student-loan debt: • Outstanding student loan balances reported on credit reports increased to $1.08 trillion (+$53 billion) as of December […]
Yesterday, I received an unhappy email from the CEO of the on-line "crowdfunding" site Kickstarter, which regular folks use to raise money for unusual and creative projects and businesses. The email began: On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our […]