by Jeff Sovern Various advocates have been calling recently for the Postal Service to get back into banking to seve the unbanked or underbanked. The financial industry has largely opposed postal banking, preumably because it doesn't want the competition. One way to determine whether postal banking would be a mistake or a positive is to […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
by Jeff Sovern You know those bulletin boards you used to see at some doctors' offices with snapshots of babies they had either treated or delivered? Well, last week, the Times ran an article, Baby Pictures at the Doctor’s? Cute, Sure, but Illegal about how display of the photos where patients and others could see them […]
Ron Elwood has written The Verdict Is in: Payday Lending Is Guilty as Charged, Clearinghouse Review: the Journal of Poverty Law & Policy. Here's the abstract: The payday loan is symptomatic of the failure to provide access to reasonably priced credit. By understanding the fallacies in the arguments used to justify payday loans, advocates can […]
Kevin M. McDonald of VW Credit, Inc. and Kenneth J. Rojc of Nisen & Elliott, LLC have written Automotive Finance: Shifting into Regulatory Overdrive, 69 Bus. Law. 599 (2014). Here is the abstract: As part of the Annual Survey of the American Bar Association Section on Business Law, this article examines the impact of the […]
Last year, we posted a link to Omri Ben-Shahar's review of Margaret Jane Radin's Boilerplate. Now she returns the favor by comenting on More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, the book he co-authored with Carl Schneider in her essay, Dismissing Disclosure? Here is the abstract: This essay responds to a […]
The New York Times has run several troubling pieces recently on predatory subprime car lending, most notably here. Today's Times includes an editorial that states: Dealers who can offload loans to banks before the loans fail take the same rapacious approach that mortgage lenders took in the run-up to the recession. They prey on less […]
Kenneth K. Ching of Regent has written What We Consent to When We Consent to Form Contracts: Market Price. Here is the abstract: Contracts require consent, yet no one reads form contracts. So what do we consent to when we consent to form contracts? Scholarly answers to this question range from “we consent to everything […]
Anne Fleming of Georgetown has written The Rise and Fall of Unconscionability as the 'Law of the Poor,' 102 Georgetown Law Journal No. 5 (2014). Here's the abstract: What happened to unconscionability? Here’s one version of the story: The doctrine of unconscionability experienced a brief resurgence in the mid-1960s at the hands of naive, left-liberal, […]
by Jeff Sovern An American Banker article this week (behind paywall) noted that payday lending has been the subject of only one percent of the complaints to the CFPB complaint database. According to the article: "The 1% figure for payday is very low… I think the CFPB is probably surprised, or at least disappointed," said […]