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 […]
Scammers who use love to target consumers can take both an emotional and a financial toll on their victims. New complaint data from the Federal Trade Commission shows romance scams generated more reported losses than any other consumer fraud type reported to the agency in 2018. The FTC reports that romance scammers "often find their […]
Seven million Americans are at least 90 days behind on payments for automobile loans, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. According to the study, more people are now delinquent or late on loan payments than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. A blog post by the study's […]
A New York Times editorial today addresses the proposal by the Consumer Financial protection Bureau to gut the Bureau's own rule protecting low-income borrowers from predatory practices of payday lenders. As the NYT put it, "The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau betrayed financially vulnerable Americans last week by proposing to gut rules conceived during the […]
Over the past few years, the law firm Higbee and Associates (based in Los Angeles, although it pretentiously labels itself a "National Law Firm") has become identified with a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands for the payment of significant sums of money by individuals and nonprofits whose web sites feature […]
In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a rule to protect borrowers from payday lending practices that harmed consumers. Today it proposed to eliminate several important protections that it earlier adopted to prevent industry practices from trapping low-income people in cycles of debt. I have not yet had a chance to read proposal in […]
In an en banc decision late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that a San Francisco ordinance requiring ads for sugar-sweetened beverages to warn of the link between overconsumption and obesity violates the First Amendment. The decision indicates that the Supreme Court's decision last term in National Institute of […]
It includes lectures by Omri Ben-Shahar on economic analysis of consumer protection law and Jonathan Masur on the behavioral law & economics of consumer choice. More here.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today filed a proposed settlement with several payday lenders: NDG Financial Corp., E-Care Contact Centers, Ltd., Blizzard Interactive Corp., New World Consolidated Lending Corp., New World Lenders Corp., Payroll Loans First Lenders Corp., New World RRSP Lenders Corp., Northway Financial Corp., Ltd., and Northway Broker, Ltd., as well as several […]
I missed this last week: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau settled a case against Mark Corbett, a broker of contracts offering high-interest credit to veterans. The CFPB explained that it "found that Corbett violated the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 by misrepresenting to consumers that the contracts he facilitates are valid and enforceable when, […]