by Jeff Sovern My colleague, Vincent DiLorenzo, has written Fintech Lending: A Study of Expectations Versus Market Outcomes, Forthcoming in Review of Banking & Financial Law. Here is the abstract: This paper documents the expectations for the fintech lending industry, which has emerged in this decade, and compares such expectations to market outcomes. It presents an […]
Category Archives: Predatory Lending
Shmuel I. Becher of Victoria University of Wellington, Yuval Feldman of Bar-Ilan University and Orly Lobel of San Diego have written Poor Consumer(s) Law: The Case of High-Cost Credit and Payday Loans in Legal Applications of Marketing Theory, Jacob Gersen & Joel Steckel, eds., Cambridge University Press (2019, Forthcoming). Here's the abstract: Consumers in general, and […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the question David Dayen raises in an important essay in InTheseTimes, Trump Appointees Are Pushing a Deregulation Plan That Could Dramatically Erode Consumer Protections. As Dayen points out, in the run-up to the Great Recession, the OCC proclaimed that state anti-predatory lending laws were preempted as to national banks. We know […]
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, […]
Here. Listen to it while driving. It explores people involved in the CFPB's dismissal of the Golden Valley payday lending case and quotes Chris Peterson.
The report is here. This looks bad. This is the Golden Valley case in which the lender charged up to 950%. Here's an excerpt: Mulvaney declined requests for an interview. In an email, his press representative first said the decision to drop the Golden Valley lawsuit was made by "professional career staff" and not Mulvaney. […]
by Jeff Sovern Last month, Interim Director Mulvaney announced that the Bureau may reconsider the Bureau's payday lending rule. But he can't just rescind it. That would require a full notice-and-comment rulemaking, and that would take longer than Mulvaney will be at the CFPB (under the Vacancies Act, he is limited to 210 days). True, […]
Ann Fleming of Georgetown has written a book, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance. I'm pasting in a blurb below, but first, for those who want to know more about this subject but don't have time to read the book just now, here are some other options. Last fall, Ann wrote a WaPo op-ed about the […]
by Jeff Sovern The drip of bad news for consumer protection continues. Yesterday, the CFPB announced a "Call for Evidence Regarding Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Functions;" Evan Weinberger has more at Law360. Today we learned, as Allison posted, that the Bureau's budgetary request for this quarter is nothing–it will spend down its reserves instead. Allison […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. It seems unlikely that the Bureau would go to the trouble of a rulemaking only to ratify the rule. The Bureau had previously stated that it intended to amend the prepay card rule.