Here (behind paywall). The article consists mostly of quotes and statistics. Some excerpts (for some reason, I couldn't get the paragraph breaks to work correctly): * * * Republican lawmakers continue to gun for the CFPB. More than 50 bills pending in Congress have sought to defund, change or somehow restrict the agency. * * […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Mary Spector of SMU and Ann Baddour of Texas Appleseed, Fair Financial Services Project, have written Collection Texas-Style: An Analysis of Consumer Collection Practices in and Out of the Courts, 67 Hastings Law Journal (2016). Here's the abstract: As many as forty-four percent of Texans with credit files have non-mortgage debt in collection; this is more […]
Here. From the Executive Summary: NCRC has found an extensive mortgage lending imbalance in St. Louis, with mortgage credit distribution heavily swayed by income levels and the racial makeup of neighborhoods. These trends are noteworthy, especially within the City of St. Louis. While median family income is a crucial factor, lending is concentrated in majority […]
The full platform is here. Here are excerpts on consumer protection issues: The Republican vision for American banking calls for establishing transparent, efficient markets where consumers can obtain loans they need at reasonable rates based on market conditions. Unfortunately, in response to the financial institutions crisis of 2008-2009, the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted the Wall Street […]
by Jeff Sovern As we have previously noted, the CFPB has scheduled a July 28 debt collection field hearing, and could announce the beginning of the SBREFA process, leading to a rule-making, that day. NCLC's April Kuehnhoff speculates that the Bureau will also release the results of its debt collection studies then. The Bureau's arbitration study […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week, I posted the abstract for our article, Are Validation Notices Valid? An Empirical Evaluation of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices. In this post, I wanted to write about something that didn’t appear in the abstract: the extent to which respondents thought a collection letter said the collector would […]
by Jeff Sovern I have now finished the audio version of David Dayen's book, Chain of Title. With two caveats, I think it's an excellent book. The caveats: first, I don't know enough about the events it describes to know how accurate it is, and second, I lose some comprehension with audiobooks, as opposed to […]
Here. The Bureau is likely to announce the Small Business Regulatory Fairness Enforcement Act (SBREFA) proceeding that day, which will entail giving some information about what its proposed debt collection rules are likely to look like.
The story is headlined Pence VP Pick Could Shape Trump's Banking Policy (free content). Here is what the article says about Pence's view of the CFPB: When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was just a legislative proposal, Pence objected to giving a new agency so much power; he would likely support efforts to reform the structure […]
by Jeff Sovern Allison posted yesterday about the National Financial Capability Study. GW Business School professor Annamarie Lusardi has a Wall Street Journal essay titled So Much Student Debt, So Much Ignorance, about what the Study, which she co-authored, shows about student debt. An excerpt: The latest NFCS data find that about one-in-five loan holders […]