by Jeff Sovern Allison blogged earlier about Kate Berry's American Banker article, CFPB signals pullback on discrimination cases. I wanted to say a bit more about this area. Depending on how you count, there are basically three ways to prove credit discrimination cases. One, that is theoretically possible, but that you virtually never see in practice, […]
Category Archives: Credit Reporting
Joseph Lawler reports in the Washington Examiner. Excerpt: [T]he resolution passed Tuesday raises a tricky legal question regarding what it means for Congress to disapprove of informal guidance that an agency sends to businesses. When Congress disapproves of a rule enforced by an agency, the meaning is clear: The agency is not allowed to enforce […]
Here, in the LA Times. The headline reads White House-backed bill purports to strengthen consumer protection. It does the opposite. Excerpt: California's credit-freeze law, for example, says no one can access your credit file if a freeze is in place, including a potential employer performing a background check or an insurance company. The new federal bill, […]
by Jeff Sovern The NY Times has an op-ed, Beyond Starbucks: How Racism Shapes Customer Service. Here’s an excerpt: In one experiment, we emailed approximately 6,000 hotels across the United States from 12 fictitious email accounts. We varied the names of the senders to signal different attributes, such as race and gender, to the recipients. […]
Shahar Dillbary of Alabama and Griffin Sims Edwards of the University of Alabama at Birmingham – Department of Marketing, Industrial Distribution & Economics have written An Empirical Analysis of Sexual Orientation Discrimination, University of Chicago Law Review, 2018 Forthcoming. Here's the abstract: This study is the first to empirically demonstrate widespread discrimination across the United States based on […]
by Jeff Sovern So Banking Exchange reports. Excerpt: Otting believes a flaw of how CRA has evolved is its strong emphasis on low-to-moderate income mortgage lending and lending for low-to-moderate income multifamily housing. He thinks more types of activities should count toward meeting CRA’s intention. For example, he says, small business lending in low-to-moderate income […]
The WSJ report is here. As for the impact on discriminatory lending, see Adam Levitin writing at Credit Slips. It remains unclear how the House will respond to the bill.
Taylor A. Begley of Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis and Amiyatosh Purnanandam of Ross School of Business, University of Michigan have written Color and Credit: Race, Regulation, and the Quality of Financial Services. Here is the abstract: The incidence of mis-selling, fraud, and poor customer service by retail banks is significantly higher in markets […]
by Jeff Sovern Yesterday I expressed doubt about whether it matters if the CFPB backs off on investigating Equifax. Now I'm wondering if I was wrong to do so. I hadn't given enough thought to the CFPB's supervisory responsibilities over collection bureaus. Vox has an article which reports: A CFPB spokesperson said in an email to […]
by Jeff Sovern The answer to the question is that I'm not sure it does. Brian reported earlier today that Reuters is saying that the CFPB has put its Equifax probe on ice. But Reuters also reports that Equifax says it is under investigation by every state AG, that the FTC is investigating, and that […]