Patricia McCoy has written "Inside Job: The Assault on the Structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau." Here is the abstract: Soon after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President, while Republicans controlled Congress, opponents of the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) opened a campaign against the Bureau. Their target was less the […]
Politico reports that the Trump administration "for months concealed a report that showed Wells Fargo charged college students fees that were on average several times higher than some of its competitors." The “unpublished” report was obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information Act request. … The previously unseen analysis examined the fees associated with […]
CBS News reports on a new report that finds that the 2017 Equifax data breach was "entirely preventable." A 14-month congressional investigation slammed credit rating agency Equifax for lacking preventative measures in a data breach that exposed the personal information of 148 million Americans last year. According to the House report, hackers gained access to […]
Yesterday Public Citizen issued a new report on the Department of Education’s mismanagement of the TEACH Grant program. The report is based on more than 2,400 pages of records we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, most of which we released for the first time yesterday. The report paints a dire picture of […]
At this point, it should come as no surprise to read about mobile app tracking users and selling the data. But an article in today's New York Times still makes for interesting and disturbing reading. The article explains that – At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location […]
The top consumer protection official at the Federal Trade Commission is barred from handling cases involving more than 100 different companies due to conflicts of interest from his prior work as a private sector attorney, according to documents obtained by Public Citizen. Andrew Smith, who last May became the director of the FTC’s Consumer Protection […]
Two Senators — Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) — are introducing a bill today that would ban the use confessions of judgment by predatory lenders. The issue is a provision in some loan agreements for small businesses, in which the lender requires the small-business borrower to agree not to defend themselves in court […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the title of my essay my colleague Gina Calabrese and I wrote here in Bloomberg Law. Excerpt: The ABA argues that consumers don’t need protection from unscrupulous lawyers because lawyers are already subject to state ethics rules largely written by the ABA itself. Experience tells us otherwise. When a law firm sued […]
Originally posted in Take Care Blog Law prof Mark Totten has written an interesting piece for the Take Care Blog entitled Proving that Mick Mulvaney Compromised CFPB Enforcement. We posted Tuesday about a Washington Post article, which cited Mark's data on the CFPB's waning enforcement efforts. Read Mark's post and take a look at the chart below.
The Washington Post reports today on the Consumer Financial protection Bureau, one year after Director Richard Cordray, who was appointed by President Obama, stepped down and was replaced with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. If you care about consumer financial protection, it's not a happy story. One year after Mulvaney’s arrival, he and his political aides […]