Category Archives: Predatory Lending

ProPublica story on how Utah payday lenders get borrowers jailed for missing payments

Here. Excerpt: Across Utah, high-interest lenders filed 66% of all small claims cases heard between September 2017 and September 2018, according to a new analysis of court records conducted by a team led by Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and the financial services director at the Consumer Federation of America, […]

Matt Bruckner article on preventing predation in fintech lending

Matthew A. Bruckner of Howard has written Preventing Predation & Encouraging Innovation in Fintech Lending. Here is the abstract: More than 20 years ago, IBM's Deep Blue vanquished chess grandmaster and reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a pair of best-of-six matches. Since then, numerous companies have invested large sums of money to develop additional […]

Hayashi Paper: Consumer Law Myopia

Andrew T. Hayashi of Virginia has written Consumer Law Myopia. Here is the abstract: People make mistakes with debt, partly because the chance to buy now and pay later tempts them to do things that are not in their long-term interest. Lenders sell credit products that exploit this vulnerability. In this Article, I argue that critiques […]

New Report from U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Frontier Group on Auto Lending

Today, my colleagues at U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Frontier Group released a new report, “Driving Into Debt: The Hidden Cost of Risky Auto Loans to Consumers and Our Communities.” According to the executive summary (emphasis in original): In much of America, access to a car is all but required to hold a job […]

DiLorenzo FinTech Article

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 […]

Paper on Poor Consumers, High-Cost Credit, and Payday Loans

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 […]

Will the OCC Try to Preempt State Consumer Protection Rules in FinTech, as It Once Did for Predatory Lending?

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 […]

New Report from the Center for Responsible Lending Examines the Repayment Experiences of Payday Loan Borrowers in Colorado

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, […]

NPR Reports Mulvaney Was Involved in Decision to Dismiss Payday Lending Case Despite Earlier CFPB Claims That He Wasn’t

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. […]