As the New York Times reports today, Deutsche Bank will pay a $2.5 billion penalty to United States and British authorities to settle accusations that it helped manipulate the benchmarks used to set interest rates on trillions of dollars in mortgages, student loans, credit cards and other debt, officials said on Thursday. The rate that […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
In a recent interview on The Daily Show, the Senator explains how students and large financial institutions are treated differently when it comes to being able to get out of high interest rates -– and why she thinks the laws are the way they are (spoiler alert: it’s not because it’s a good idea). Watch […]
In last week's decision Byrd v. Aaron's, Inc., a unanimous panel of the Third Circuit reversed a district court's decision to deny class certification on ascertainability grounds. (You'll recall that ascertainability is the court-developed notion that a class must show an administratively feasible means of identifying class members; the test is particularly strict and plaintiff-unfriendly […]
…is the question analysis by this thoughtful piece in Vox (with an embedded clip from The West Wing, for those of you feeling nostalgic for a more harmonious time in government, however fictional). The occasion for the discussion is Sen. Rand Paul’s proposal to make college completely tax deductible. See whom that would help most, […]
John Oliver has this marvelously clear and detailed report on modern-day debtors’ prisons and how the combination of poor public policy, municipalities’ reliance on fines for their budgets, and private probation companies yields a legal system in which a minor infraction can ruin your life if you don’t have the money to pay the fine. […]
Fivethirtyeight.com has a thoughtful analysis this week about "equal pay day," which is the day on which the earnings of the average woman who worked continuously from the beginning of 2014 would catch up to the earnings of the average man who started at the same time but stopped at the end of 2014. (Put […]
…is the message of a Public Citizen post yesterday on Buzzfeed, which points to five reasons that a disaster of the same magnitude could recur. The problems, mainly, are a lack of safeguards and the absence of accountability. Read the whole analysis here.
The Dodd-Frank law shouldn't be the end of Congress's financial reform efforts, argued Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a speech today at the Levy Economics Institute. Sen. Warren called for specific additional regulatory measures, including the breaking up of big banks, closing regulatory loopholes, imposing tougher punishments for wrongdoing, and limiting the Fed's emergency lending powers […]
Affirming a district court's dismissal, the Seventh Circuit held that Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin did not have standing to challenge federal rules implementing Obamacare coverage for members of Congress and their staffs. Johnson's primary argument was that he suffered electoral/reputational injury by being subject to Obamacare coverage. The court rejected that argument because Johnson was […]
We've discussed before how minor infractions, when combined with a person's inability to pay, court fees, and predatory practices of private probation companies, can ruin someone's life. (See, for instance, here and here.) In today's New York Times, read this story about how the loss of a driver's license — one consequence of falling down […]