Read about it here. Here are excerpts: The closed-door meeting [with President Obama] included Richard Cordray, the newly-confirmed director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as the chairs of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Securities and […]
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By Paul Bland @PblandBland The last few years have often been pretty discouraging for consumer advocates who are trying to preserve their clients’ rights to take disputes to court. As the Supreme Court majority’s madcap love affair with forced arbitration just keeps getting more passionate (ick), courts at all levels seem to be enforcing […]
by Brian Wolfman The Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) provides jurisdiction in federal district court (originally and by removal) for most minimally diverse class actions and for so-called "mass actions." Under CAFA, a mass action is, as relevant to this post any civil action … in which monetary relief claims of 100 or more persons […]
The country suffers from continuing high unemployment. The current official unemployment rate is 7.4%. The real unemployment rate is considerably higher because some unemployed people have stopped looking for work and don't get counted as unemployed. So, that's a lot of unemployed people. The unemployed people looking for work have trouble finding it in part […]
In the three-and-half decades since enactment of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, airfares have plummeted in real terms. That reduction in price includes those dreaded fees for baggage, seat upgrades, etc., which make up only a small fraction of consumers' overall cost of travel. But beginning in 2009, fares began to creep up, as indicated […]
by Paul Alan Levy Clark Baker is a lone voice in the wilderness, proclaiming that the relationship of HIV to AIDS is a myth, that it is scientific fraud and the desire of big Pharma to pump up its profits that created this myth, and hence that there is nothing wrong with HIV positive people […]
by Brian Wolfman We've been covering the congressional debate over interest rates on students loans. (Go, for instance, here and here.) On Friday, President Obama signed the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013. It will bring most undergraduate loan rates below 4%. (Those rates were at 3.4% before July 1, when they doubled because Congress […]
by Paul Alan Levy A hundred fifty dollars. That is all it would take for the American Postal Workers Union to hire an outside mail service through which every one of the candidates in its internal union election, slated to begin one month from today, could email multiple campaign messages to every member for whom […]
Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Corvello v. Wells Fargo that when a bank tells a borrower it will modify his loan if certain conditions are met under the Treasury Department's Home Affordable Modification Program (“HAMP”), that promise is enforceable. When Phillip Corvello applied for a home loan modification, Wells Fargo set up a trial […]
As this story in the Guardian explains, Wal-Mart has agreed in a settlement to pay the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration a 190K fine and to improve worker safety at 2,800 of its stores. Here's an excerpt: Walmart has agreed to improve safety conditions at more than 2,800 stores in 28 US states after […]