…but is having trouble finding allies even on her own side of the aisle, reports Politico. The reason? Although loans from car dealers "are often the largest kind of unregulated debt consumers have" (part of the reason Sen. Warren is seeking greater regulation), the auto dealer industry is powerful: The $730 billion auto-dealer industry enjoys […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
Under a consent order between the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Bank of America, BoA will pay a $30 million fine and increase oversight of servicemembers' accounts to prevent further violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. Among the violations found by the OCC here were improper debt collection procedures using affidavits […]
The Hill reports on a proposal in the Senate to create a committee to go after "regulatory overreach." (Read the story here.) But as Public Citizen explains, in the wake of the Amtrak crash, oil train derailments, and massive auto safety recalls, "The last thing Congress should be doing is creating more delays for new […]
Yesterday, DOL proposed guidance and regulations that would protect workers in two important ways. First, corporations would be prevented from receiving federal contracts if they have bad worker safety records or histories of wage theft. Second, federal contractors would not be permitted to use employment contracts that impose forced arbitration on their workers. In a […]
The State of New York prohibits charging more than 25% interest. You'd think that would be plenty of profit for any lender, but Saliha Madden's creditors (Midland Funding and a sister entity) wanted more. When they sought to collect a higher rate of interest from her, she sued under state and federal law and sought […]
Read this Paul Krugman column in the New York Times from this past weekend. He exposes how the defenses of the TPP offered by its supporters don't answer the charges made against it by its opponents: The administration’s main analytical defense of the trade deal came earlier this month, in a report from the Council […]
Today, Professor Rebecca Tushnet of Georgetown Law (and of 43(B)log fame), represented by Public Citizen, filed motions to intervene and unseal court documents in a trademark dispute in which two companies claim that Amazon infringed their trademark by advertising the companies' product (a dietary supplement called SeroVital) even when the product wasn't available on Amazon […]
Last week, a Missouri jury awarded about a quarter-million dollars in compensatory and $82 million in punitive damages to a woman who was hounded for over a year by debt collector Portfolio Recovery Associates for a $1100 debt that wasn’t hers. The problem, according to the plaintiff’s lawyer, is the debt collector tries to collect […]
"The magnitude of falsity, conservatively measured, is enormous," wrote U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York near the start of her a 361-page ruling in Federal Housing Finance Agency v. Nomura Holding America, decided last week after a four-week trial. The core question at issue in the case, in which […]
Read this fascinating first-hand account of ten months in the life of a debt collector. The author's conclusion: "My agonizing time as a debt collector did have one bright spot … . After spending ten months wallowing in the misery of others, I'd found it hard to be depressed myself." (Warning for sensitive readers: the […]