Category Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Soliciting Comments on an Arbitration Study

by Jeff Sovern I figure if it's good enough for the CFPB, it's good enough for us:  I'm part of a team, along with other professors and the Hugh L Carey Center for Dispute Resolution here at the Law School, that is crafting a survey on consumer understanding of arbitration clauses.  Unlike the CFPB survey, […]

Court Dismisses Big Springs Bank’s Constitutional Challenge to CFPB

by Deepak Gupta As some of us predicted on the day it was filed, Judge Ellen Huvelle of the U.S. District Court in Washington has just dismissed for lack of standing an ideologically-motivated constitutional challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure and authority, including a challenge to Rich Cordray's recess appointment. The case was […]

Ian Ayres et al. Analyze CFPB Consumer Complaints

Ian Ayres of Yale, together with  Jeff Lingwall and Sonia Steinway, have written Skeletons in the Database:  An Early Analysis of the CFPB's Consumer Complaints.  Here's the abstract: Analyzing a new data set of 110,000 consumer complaints lodged with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we find that (i) Bank of America, Citibank, and PNC Bank […]

Susan Block-Lieb Paper on Accountability and the CFPB

Though the confirmation of CFPB Director Cordray mutes the issue of CFPB accountabilty, it does not moot it.  Those who remain interested in the issue may wish to consult Susan Block-Lieb of Fordham's paper, Accountability and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, 7 Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law (2013).  Here's the abstract: […]

Roll Call: How Cordray Snagged 17 Republicans

by Jeff Sovern Here.  According to the story, Republicans agreed to vote for Cordray because he promised to testify before (Portman's phrasing) brief (according to the CFPB spokesperson) the Appropriations Committee on the CFPB budget. Another piece of the agreement, according to Portman, is that the Bureau will implement cost-benefit analysis of CFPB regulations, though […]

Things Happening in Privacy Too

by Jeff Sovern Last week, we linked to Ed Mierzwinski's post about complaints about CFPB information-gathering processes.  There's more.  Over at the Taking Charge blog, Fred Williams has a post on the CFPB data collection, Privacy Agencies Say Don't Worry: Consumer Bureau is No Spy.  Here's an excerpt: "I am not aware of any privacy […]

Cordray Confirmed (66-34)!

The confirmation was inevitable after this morning's deal and the vote just before noon, but it's official — Richard Cordray is the Senate-confirmed Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The Senate has voted to confirm Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as senators approved the first of a batch of […]

A Comment on the CFPB’s Debt Collection Bulletin

by Jeff Sovern As Deepak pointed out last week, a lot has been going on in debt collection, and one item is that the CFPB has issued a bulletin stating that people subject to its jurisdiction may not commit unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices in collecting debts.  The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act generally does […]

Ed Mierzwinski: Banks, Not CFPB, Spy on Consumers

Ed's excellent post is here.  Those who purport to be so concerned about the privacy of bank customers should seek to amend the Gramm-Leach-Bliley privacy provisions to bar banks from selling consumer information unless their customers affirmatively opt-in to the sale of that information. But that would mean supporting consumer protection, precisely what the CFPB […]

More on Debt Collection: CFPB To Go After Banks’ Collection Practices

Suddenly, there's a lot going on the in the world of debt collection regulation. On the heels of yesterday's announcement by the FTC of a huge debt-collection settlement (discussed in the post below), the CFPB is announcing today that it will use its UDAAP authority to regulate the collection practices of banks. “It doesn’t matter […]