Today, the Center for Responsible Lending released a new report examining the repayment experiences of borrowers of longer-term payday loans in Colorado. The report is based on focus groups that were conducted in four Colorado cities in September 2017. The full report is worth the read, but here are the key takeaways: In many cases, […]
Category Archives: Credit Reporting
Jonathan Weinberg of Wayne State has written 'Know Everything that Can Be Known About Everybody': The Birth of the Credit Report, Villanova Law Review, Forthcoming. Here is the abstract: A remarkable amount of our personal information is in the hands of corporations such as the Experian credit bureau; strangers to us, they make their money by collecting our […]
Yan Zhang of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has written Assessing Fair Lending Risks Using Race/Ethnicity Proxies, 64 Management Science (January 2018). Here is the abstract: Fair lending analysis of non-mortgage credit products often involves proxying for race/ethnicity since such information is not required to be reported. Using mortgage data, this paper […]
by Jeff Sovern Here, against Security Group, Inc. As expected, the case involves debt collection problems but the Bureau also found FCRA issues. Here's an interesting thing about the case: remember how Mulvaney suggested that enforcement actions ought to be based on the numbers of complaints received? Well, I ran the three names in the CFPB's […]
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, […]
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 […]