Author Archives: Jeff Sovern

Report That Trump Preparing to Replace Head of OCC, Agency That Affects Consumers

WSJ has a story here (behind paywall).  The OCC famously declared state anti-predatory lending laws preempted as to national banks, which probably worsened some of the subprime lending leading to the Great Recession.  It also received 700 whistleblower reports about Wells Fargo employees gaming the incentive plans (that led to the unauthorized accounts scandal) back in […]

SCOTUS Rules Cities Have Standing Under FHA to Challenge Discriminatory Mortgage Lending

The decision is here. SCOTUSblog analysis here. Here's the first paragraph of that analysis: The Supreme Court handed a partial but significant victory to cities today, holding that the Fair Housing Act allows the city of Miami to bring a lawsuit alleging that two banks, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, violated the law when […]

House Financial Services Committee to Markup (Vote on?) Choice Act Tuesday

The Hill reports that "Panel Democrats say they're preparing to offer dozens of amendments and plan to draw out the hearing for hours, as they make the case to protect the Obama-era financial regulation law."  Meanwhile, according to CNN Money,  the "bill is likely to clear the House, where Republicans hold the majority and don't need […]

Study Finds Many Consumers Can’t Tell That Native Ads are Paid Content

David A. Hyman of Georgetown, David J. Franklyn of the University of San Francisco, Calla E. Yee of Kilpatrick, Townsend & Stockton, and Mohammad Rahmati of Sharif University have written Going Native: Can Consumers Recognize Native Advertising? Does it Matter? 19 Yale J.L. & Tech. 77 (2017).  Here the abstract: Native advertising, which matches the […]

House Financial Services Committee Reported Set to Markup Financial Choice Act Next Week

by Jeff Sovern So CNNMoney reports here. The Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow; the witness list appears here.  Seems pretty rushed for a 600-page bill that would make major changes in financial regulation, including changing the structure of the CFPB, eliminating its power to prohibit unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices, abrogating its power to […]

Cortez Article: Regulation by Database

Nathan Cortez of SMU has written Regulation by Database, University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 89, 2017. Here is the abstract: The federal government currently publishes 195,245 searchable databases online, a number of which include information about private parties that is negative or unflattering in some way. Federal agencies increasingly publish adverse data not just […]

How Effective Are Threats in Debt Collection? Experiment Finds Threats of Prosecution for Nonpayment of Taxes More Effective Than Other Messsages Tested

Bloomberg reports in a story headlined How Detroit Deadbeats Taught Tax Collectors That Threats Really Work, on a study by Ben S. Meiselman titled Ghostbusting in Detroit: Evidence on Nonfilers from a Controlled Field Experiment.  No wonder some debt collectors use threats!

Financial Choice Act 2 Draft Now Out: More Like a Bank Protection Act

by Jeff Sovern Here.  As previously reported on the blog, it would eliminate the CFPB's power to stop unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices (section 736)–that is, the power the Bureau used to stop Wells Fargo from opening sham accounts–and to regulate arbitration (section 738)–that is, the section that would give the CFPB the power to […]