According to a report issued by the Federal Trade Commission last week, between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018, the agency’s law enforcement actions yielded more than $2.3 billion in refunds to defrauded consumers, including $122 million mailed directly by the FTC to 2.2 million people. The report is here.
That's the name of this story by Elizabeth Dwoskin. Here's an excerpt: Last May, officials in Midlothian, Texas, a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered Toys R Us warehouse. … The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier, went […]
Law profs Charlie Silver, David Hyman, and Bernard Black have published Fictions and Facts: Medical Malpractice Litigation, Physician Supply, and Health Care Spending in Texas Before and after HB 4. Note the study's findings in the abstract below: This article, written for a symposium issue of the Texas Tech Law Review, summarizes our research on […]
That's the topic of a bluntly-titled article — Taxing Rich Dead People to Tackle Student Loan Debt — by law prof Victoria J. Haneman. The abstract follows. (Note in particular the stats in the second paragraph of the abstract concerning Millennials' financial situation.) Once upon a time, there was a generation of indentured servants called […]
The University of Michigan Center for Finance, Law and Policy is holding a conference titled Consumer Protection in an Age of Uncertainty on March 21 and 22. It's great that there will be two excellent consumer law academic conferences in so short a span!
The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice is holding its Consumer Law Scholars Conference on Thursday and Friday. More information, including the papers to be discussed, here. The Conference has an impressive list of participants and it promises to be a terrific event.
Natasha Sarin of Penn has written Making Consumer Finance Work. Here's the abstract: The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets. Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared […]
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 […]