Forbes last week had this article on class action cases. The article is surprising for its overall favorable treatment of the topic, given that, as the article states, "[t]hese sorts of lawsuits aren’t our cup of tea here at Forbes." An interview with Jonathan Selbin at the law firm Lieff Cabraser gave the reporter a […]
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Check out an illuminating New Yorker commentary about the success of government programs providing homes for homeless people. Many policy approaches to homelessness assume that society should help homeless people get other aspects of their lives in order before they transition to permanent housing. That’s the wrong order, argues the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, with […]
Michael Lewis at Bloomberg View reports on a This American Life story on 46 hours of tapes secretly recorded by a Fed employee embedded at Goldman Sachs. An excerpt from Lewis's story: * * * In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or […]
Read this article by Michael Corkery and Jessica Sliver-Greenberg. Here's an excerpt: The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. The symposium, on Ben-Shahar's and Schneider's More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, has been running since last week and features contributions by names that will be familiar to regular readers of consumer law literature, including Lauren Willis of Loyola-LA, David Vladeck of Georgetown, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler of NYU, Nancy Kim of Cal Western, […]
Both funny and depressing. Either way, worth a watch (about 10 minutes) to learn about our elected leaders' relationship to science.
The Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press and eight news organizations submitted comments to that effect to the CFPB. The comments specifically ask the agency to abandon a proposal to disclose complaints only when the author "opts in" to having the complaints shared. "The relationship between consumers and financial institutions remains a topic of […]
This article in the Federal Times from Ruth Y. Goldway, Chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, argues that her agency's program of having a designated public representative explicitly representing the public interest in the agency decisionmaking process improves outcomes. As Goldway explains: [T]he public representatives identify and discuss issues that would not otherwise be fully […]
The Washington Post offers this encouraging story from the Pacific Northwest, where a Seattle suburb's decision to raise the minimum wage has not caused the disruption that opponents predicted. And NPR's Planet Money has this story about a shopping mall on the boundary between two California cities with different wage laws; businesses and workers have […]
In more FTC news, the agency announced yesterday that online review site Yelp, Inc., and mobile app developer TinyCo, Inc., agreed to settle separate FTC charges "that they improperly collected children’s information in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, Rule." Under the settlements, Yelp will pay a $450,000 civil penalty, and […]