Here. One concern is that fees are not described uniformly, and apparently that makes it hard to comparison shop for such cards. Excerpt: “It’s like the Wild West in terms of the different fees and policies,” said Odysseas Papadimitriou, CEO of CardHub.com. “The card issuers have a million different fees and everyone calls it something […]
Category Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
by Jeff Sovern Here. An excerpt: As with the mortgage cases, the investigation focuses on the banks' poor paperwork and their weak tracking of the debts. When they sold delinquent credit card debt to the buyers, often at only a few cents on the dollar, they allegedly failed to provide them with the evidence that […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. According to the story, Representative Hensarling called the CFPB "Orwellian-titled." So I guess he doesn't think the Bureau actually protects consumers (or maybe he thinks it isn't really a bureau). I would love to hear Representative Hensarling's reasoning on that one. Does he believe, for example, that clearer disclosures are harmful to […]
Here's an excerpt from the announcement: Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced that it is gathering information to develop options for policymakers to make repayment of private student loans more manageable for struggling borrowers. The CFPB has found that private student loan borrowers who wish to pay their loans, but face high payments, […]
Politico puts out an often-interesting email newsletter, titled Morning Money, every weekday. This morning's edition quoted "a person close to" Senator Elizabeth Warren as saying the following: 'It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the large banks would have more ground to stand on with Elizabeth if they figured out a way to […]
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 […]
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 […]