by Jeff Sovern Back in 2008, Fred Williams, a reporter for the Buffalo News who had written stories about debt collectors, worked as a debt collector for an upstate New York debt collection firm. Williams was not exactly undercover–he disclosed that he had written the stories–but it sounds as if he was treated as any […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
You can sign the petition here. GoLocalWorcester.com has more here.
by Jeff Sovern The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is a bank regulator that, like the CFPB, has a single head rather than a commission structure and gets its funding outside the appropriations process. I have pointed out before two things about this: first, that unlike with the CFPB, Republicans have been happy […]
Here's the email they sent out: Good afternoon, We need your help to figure out what’s the deal with financial products marketed to students, like debit cards and checking accounts. Email us at CFPB_StudentsFedReg@cfpb.gov by March 18 to tell us about any aspect of your experience. That may include: Signing up for the card or account […]
Carolyn Dessin of Akron has written Arbitrability and Vulnerability, 21 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 349 (2012). Here's the abstract: Arbitration is cool. Everybody's doing it. In the eighty-five years since the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Recent decades have seen the meteoric rise of […]
by Jeff Sovern You can read Senator Rubio's speech here. Here's the key language: "a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies." He doesn't specify the policies, but he's probably referring to the old, thoroughly debunked, claim that the CRA caused the subprime crisis, something the Republican presidential […]
Victimized by Credit Reports. An excerpt: Given the evidence, it is imperative that the federal government do more to make the credit-reporting process transparent and to protect consumers from errors that can drive up their borrowing costs and cause them to be denied jobs or be turned away by landlords. * * * * * […]
Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog. Excerpt: The consumer bureau has taken seriously its mandate to protect the public from the kinds of abuses that helped lead to the 2009 recession, and it has not been intimidated by the financial industry’s army of lobbyists. That’s what worries Republicans. They can’t prevent the bureau from regulating their […]
The symposium is scheduled for Feb. 28, 2013, 9:30 AM – 6:30 PM, at the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF LAW (registration by Feb. 26). The announcement states: Mandatory disclosure is a popular form of regulation. From privacy to healthcare, politics to “payola,” laws requiring disclosure have proliferated in recent decades. This symposium features panel discussions by top scholars […]