by Jeff Sovern On a party line vote of 31-21, the House Appropriations Committee passed the Financial Services Appropriation bill. Section 930 of the bill repeals the CFPB's authority to regulate arbitration. Section 926 would subject the CFPB to the congressional appropriations process, thereby making it more accountable to lobbyists. Section 927 would gut the […]
Category Archives: Predatory Lending
by Jeff Sovern Last month, Jeffrey Joseph posted Tyrannical CFPB tarnishes July 4th holiday in The Hill. Well, ok; others have so claimed, including House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling. Joseph is described at the end of the op-ed only as "a business professor at the George Washington University School of Business." I was curious to see what […]
by Jeff Sovern We posted yesterday about the House Appropriations Bill. I haven't studied the bill, but on a quick look, it contains a number of objectionable provisions from the Financial Choice Act (already passed by the House), including repeal of the CFPB's power to regulate arbitration and payday lenders and to block conduct on […]
Paige Marta Skiba and Jean Xiao of Vanderbilt have written Consumer Litigation Funding: Just Another Form of Payday Lending? 80 Law and Contemporary Problems (2017). Here is the abstract: This article provides a side-by-side comparison of payday lending and consumer litigation funding in order to aid policymakers. Funding has similarities with payday lending because they are […]
by Jeff Sovern Some congressional Republicans have said that the CFPB was asleep at the switch when it came to the Wells Fargo unauthorized account scandal, and that it just piggy-backed on the LA City Attorney, which was the first governmental office to bring a case against Wells for the accounts. But now the LA […]
Another important story from Jessica Silver-Greenberg & Michael Corkery here. I can't do justice to it with a brief excerpt, but see if this makes you want to read the whole piece (which you should): More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her car loan. She […]
Here. As we have noted before, the OCC plays a role in consumer protection, such as joining with the CFPB and LA City Attorney in the investigation into the Wells Fargo phony accounts. The whole article is worth a read, but here is an excerpt: In the early 2000s, banks successfully sued to stop Iowa […]
WSJ has a story here (behind paywall). The OCC famously declared state anti-predatory lending laws preempted as to national banks, which probably worsened some of the subprime lending leading to the Great Recession. It also received 700 whistleblower reports about Wells Fargo employees gaming the incentive plans (that led to the unauthorized accounts scandal) back in […]
by Jeff Sovern During the George W. Bush administration, then-Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, a former bank lobbyist and lawyer, aggressively protected banks by claiming that state anti-predatory lending laws were preempted as to national banks (remember the predatory lending that contributed to the Great Recession?), among other things. So this is a position […]
Brad Wolverton's article, Your Wallet Will Suffer If This Agency Is Gutted, is an excellent roundup of the Bureau's accomplishments that cuts across a variety of areas, including student loans, credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, payday loans, credit reporting agencies, auto lending, consumer complaints, military protections, and arbitration. Excerpt: Collectively, for every $1 in federal spending on […]