Category Archives: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Bloomberg: Banks Pushed by Regulators Send ‘Nastygrams’ to Car Dealers

Remember how car dealers fought to avoid being subject to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's jurisdiction, and won?  It turns out that the dealers are still experiencing pressure to comply with the Bureau's edicts. From Carter Dougherty's story: Under pressure from the agency, large banks that routinely buy auto loans have been reviewing records to […]

9th Circuit appeal on background-screening companies & fair credit reporting

by Deepak Gupta I thought readers might be interested in a new appeal that my firm is handling in the Ninth Circuit, Moran v. The Screening Pros, concerning the state and federal regulation of background-check companies. You can read our opening brief here. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission have weighed in with an amicus […]

CFPB Report: Credit CARD ACT “REDUCED PENALTY FEES AND MADE CREDIT CARD COSTS CLEARER”

The Report is here. From the press release: Total cost of credit declined: The CFPB found that the total cost of credit declined by two percentage points between 2008 and 2012. The total cost of credit includes all fees, interest, and finance charges paid by the consumer to the card issuer. The decline in the […]

Paper on Private Enforcement

Stephen B. Burbank of Pennsylvania, Sean Farhang of Berkeley' s Goldman School of Public Policy, and Herbert M. Kritzer of Minnesota have written Private Enforcement, 17 Lewis & Clark Law Review 637 (2013).  Here's the abstract: Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the […]

Sovern Paper: Cost-Benefit Analysis and Consumer Protection

by Jeff Sovern I've posted a paper on SSRN, Can Cost-Benefit Analysis Help Consumer Protection Laws? Or at Least Benefit Analysis?, forthcoming in the University of California-Irvine Law Review.  Here's the abstract: Cost-benefit analysis is often troubling to consumer advocates. But this article argues that in some circumstances it may help consumers. The article gives […]

CFPB Issues Bulletin on Responsibilities of Furnishers of Information to Credit Reporting Agencies

by Jeff Sovern One of the things Ira Rheingold and I wrote about in our Times op-ed earlier this summer was the need to require lenders that furnish information to conduct better investigations when they receive complaints about inaccurate information supplied to credit bureaus.  Today, the CFPB issued a bulletin about the duties of furnishers.  […]

David Skeel Paper on Behavioral Economics and the CFPB

David A. Skeel Jr. of NYU, Penn, and the European Corporate Governance Institute has written Behavioralism in Finance and Securities Law.  Here is the abstracgt: In this Essay, I take stock (as something of an outsider) of the behavioral economics movement, focusing in particular on its interaction with traditional cost-benefit analysis and its implications for […]

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 […]