Yesterday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a Request for Information (RFI) on its consumer complaint database and handling of consumer complaints submitted to it: The Bureau is seeking comments and information from interested parties to assist the Bureau in assessing its handling of consumer complaints and consumer inquiries and, consistent with law, considering whether […]
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Earlier this week, a payday pending group, the Community Financial Services Association of America, sued the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to challenge the payday lending rule issued last fall. The complaint also claims that the CFPB's structure is unconstitutional. The suit was filed in federal court in Texas. The complaint is available here. The Washington […]
Law prof Benjamin Zipursky has written The Monsanto Lecture: Online Defamation, Legal Concepts, and the Good Samaritan. Here's the abstract: Federal and state courts around the country – aided by academics on almost all sides – have completely misread the Communications Decency Act [“CDA”] § 230(c). This widely cited provision was designed to protect Internet service […]
Law prof Jim Hawkins has written Protecting Consumers as Sellers. Here's the abstract (with a few words added at the end by me): When the majority of modern contract and consumer protection laws were written in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, consumers almost always acted as buyers, and businesses almost always acted as sellers. As a […]
Read this NY Times op-ed by Georgetown Law's John Brooks entitled Don’t Let the G.O.P. Dismantle Obama’s Student Loan Reforms. Here's an excerpt (but read the whole thing): One of the most important — but least known — achievements of the Obama administration was the expansion of the income-driven repayment program for federal student loans. The program […]
Mick Mulvaney, the director of Office of Management and Budget whom President Donald Trump’s has running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sinxe CFPB director Richard Cordray stepped down, has given big pay raises to the deputies he has hired to help him run the CFPB, according to salary records obtained by The Associated Press. Mulvaney […]
We've blogged many times on the idea of taxing sugary drinks to stem the obesity/diabetes epidemic. Go, for instance, here and here. Critics claimed that these so-called soda taxes would do little to improve health while hurting grocers, particularly small grocers, who would get pummeled by consumers cutting back on purchases of sugary drinks. Nonetheless some cities enacted […]
In a detailed and informative post entitled Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough, open-courts activist Steve Schultze says explains that Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access […]
In case you missed the punchline of Jeff Sovern's post on the CFPB's annual report, the news is not the report itself (which conscientiously recites the CFPB's actions between February and September 2017, before Mick Mulvaney was appointed Acting Director following Richard Cordray's departure), but the cover letter, in which Mulvaney proposes that Congress gut […]
by Jeff Sovern Apparently the Lucchese Organized Crime Family charges less than a quarter of what payday lenders charge. Last week, New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced indictments of ten members of the group in the largest loansharking investigation in the office's history. Schneiderman's press release reports: [U]surious interest payouts exceed[ed] a million […]