After reading the post below, reader Ted Mermin of California Low-Income Consumer Coalition emailed: Last week the Governor signed a groundbreaking law providing an automatic exemption from bank levy for the last $1724 in a debtor’s account. According to the law’s findings, debt collectors routinely clean out consumers’ bank accounts, leaving nothing to pay for […]
California's Governor Newsom today signed into law legislation intended to to protect consumers from predatory lending practices that create debt traps for families already struggling financially. The bill bars payday lenders from charging high interest rates – which in the past have soared as high as 200 percent – on loans between $2,500 and $10,000. […]
Next week, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Kathy Kraninger will deliver the statutory “Semi-Annual Report of the CFPB” to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee. On his blog, US PIRG's Ed Mierzwinski suggests questions that the committee members should ask, here.
A federal court has entered a temporary restraining order against Utah-based Zurixx, LLC and affiliated companies, which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Utah Division of Consumer Protection (DCP) allege have used deceptive promises of big profits to lure consumers into real estate seminars costing thousands of dollars. The order prohibits Zurixx from making […]
Despite a court order barring the Education Department from collecting on the federal student loans of former Corinthian College students, the agency continued to pursue the debts. Some former students had their paychecks garnished or tax refunds seized by the government. The students' recently moved to hold Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt. DeVos and […]
by Paul Alan Levy It always happens during the presidential election season. This year, a bogus DMCA takedown was aimed at a video posted to Twitter by Donald Trump. Promoting his wild conspiracy theories about potential election opponent Joseph Biden, Trump fiddled with the first fifteen seconds of the video for the Nickelback musical number […]
Damian Paletta at the Washington Post has written Federal government has dramatically expanded exposure to risky mortgages, effectively asking whether conditions are forming for another homeowner mortgage crisis of the severity associated with the Great Recession. Some excerpts: The federal government has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages, as federal officials over the past […]
This article by Amy Goldstein describes "an emerging mosaic of evidence that, nearly a decade after it became one of the most polarizing health-care laws in U.S. history, the ACA is making some Americans healthier — and less likely to die."
Richard Frankel of Drexel has written Corporate Hostility to Arbitration, 50 Seton Hall Law Review (forthcoming 2020). Here is the abstract: In the last 30 years, corporations have aggressively and successfully pushed the Supreme Court to invalidate virtually all state regulation of mandatory arbitration clauses on the ground that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) preempts any […]
That's the subject of a new book by Linda Fisher of Seton Hall and Judith L. Fox of Notre Dame, published by Cambridge Press, The Foreclosure Echo: How the Hardest Hit Have Been Left Out of the Economic Recovery. You can read the introduction here. Here's the abstract: This paper includes the Table of Contents and […]