Category Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Times: Consumer Protection Agency Seeks Limits on Payday Lenders

Here.  An excerpt: At the center of the regulations being considered, the people familiar with the matter said, is a requirement that lenders assess whether borrowers can repay loans — interest and principal — at the end of a two-week period by examining their income, other debts and their payment history. Few people can, the […]

CFPB Report: Nearly Half of Borrowers Do Not Shop for a Mortgage

by Jeff Sovern As previously reported in The New York Times and CFPB Monitor, a CFPB report based on data in the National Survey of Mortgage Borrowers has found that nearly half of borrowers don't shop for a mortgage. The new report,taken together with my earlier survey of mortgage brokers finding that consumers virtually never back […]

Consumer issues in tonight’s State of the Union speech

The President highlighted consumer issues several times in his speech tonight.  Here's some of the relevant text: On Dodd-Frank and the CFPB: "We believed that sensible regulations could prevent another crisis, shield families from ruin, and encourage fair competition. Today, we have new tools to stop taxpayer-funded bailouts and a new consumer watchdog to protect […]

Amato and Willis op-ed in L.A. Times

Lauren Willis (of Loyola Los Angeles) and Theresa Amato (of the Fair Contracts Project) have a great op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times on what to do about consumer financial illiteracy. "There are dozens of entities devoted to educating you about all things financial," they write, "[b]ut none of it is working very well." Financial […]

Troubling sale of Corinthian Colleges set to close soon

by Maura Dundon (Senior Policy Counsel, Center for Responsible Lending) The sale of Corinthian Colleges (the for-profit college chain that operates Everest, WyoTech, and Heald) to the student loan debt collector ECMC is poised to close today. The deal has raised serious concerns about the fate of Corinthian students and whether the new entity represents […]

Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Sheryl Harris on the St. John’s Arbitration Study

Here.  An excerpt: Right now, the CFPB is finishing up the second phase of its study, which will hone in on consumers' understanding of arbitration clauses. At that point, it will decide whether it needs to act. If the bureau's findings are anything like those of the law school study, it must. Being stripped of our […]

Stark et al. on Mortgage Disclosures

Debra Pogrund Stark of John Marshall,Jessica M. Choplin of DePaul University, Mark A. LeBoeuf of DePaul and Andrew G. Pizor of the National Consumer Law Center have written Dodd-Frank 2.0: Creating Interactive Home-Loan Disclosures to Enable Shrewd Consumer Decision-Making, forthcoming in the Loyola Consumer Law Review. Here's the abstract: Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection […]

The Hill: House rebuffs bid to limit congressional review of CFPB

by Jeff Sovern Here.  To see why it is important to keep the CFPB's budget out of the appropriations process (just as with the other bank regulators), here's an excerpt from one of our posts from 2011 (the more things change, . . . ): To see why this matters, you have only to read New […]