From the CFPB: Over the past five years, student loan borrowers across the country have turned to us to submit complaints about the struggles they face when repaying their student loans. We have handled more than 50,000 student loan related complaints describing servicing breakdowns, debt collection hurdles, and “debt relief.” These complaints help us to […]
Here, in The Conversation. Excerpt: The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would cripple the CFPB by, for example, taking away the power it used to fine Wells Fargo for opening illegal accounts and concealing its complaint database from public view. In other words, it would force the bureau to sit idly by as financial institutions lie to […]
Note the wording of the headlines in some of the press coverage. This one – Wall Street wins big as Senate votes to roll back regulation allowing consumers to sue their banks — seems right in part. Yes, Congress's decision to kill the CFPB's arbitration rule may be seen as a big win on Wall Street, at […]
The Senate just passed Senate Joint Resolution 47, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the deciding vote, to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule barring class-action bans in consumer financial contracts. Republican Senators John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) joined all 48 Democratic Senators in voting against the measure. The House already passed the resolution. […]
The Ninth Circuit handed down an excellent decision on October 20, resolving an open question as to whether a class action plaintiff can seek future injunctive relief when she won’t get fooled again. This often arises with retail purchases, where a duped consumer who is on the ball enough to be a class representative is […]
by Jeff Sovern . . . or it could come later in the week. Or not. My speculation is that the Senate leadership will call the vote if they think they have the votes to pass the resolution but otherwise they will let it go until closer to the deadline. So the real question is […]
by Jeff Sovern The article, by Kate Berry and Ian McKendry, is headlined Fight to kill CFPB arbitration rule could rest on whose data is right. Here's some of what the article says about the OCC claims, though the article has more than I can insert here. "The uncertainty of the OCC's estimate is very large, […]
The Treasury Department's report is called Limiting Consumer Choice, Expanding Costly Litigation: An Analysis of the CFPB Arbitration Rule. The first sentence of the report's conclusion (on page 17 of the report) would be laughable if the topic — access to the courts — were not so serious: "The Bureau’s Rule would upend a century of federal […]
Guest post by Emily Martin, General Counsel and Vice President for Workplace Justice. National Women's Law Center Fox News. Sterling Jewelers. Wells Fargo. What do they all have in common? For years, they successfully kept corporate wrongdoing secret, through forced arbitration. Buried in the fine print of employment contracts and consumer agreements, forced arbitration clauses prohibit you […]
That's the topic of The Bold Ambition of Justice Scalia's Arbitration Jurisprudence: Keep Workers and Consumers Out of Court by law prof. Katherine Stone. Here's the abstract: Arbitration clauses have become a pervasive feature of modern life. The expanding scope of arbitration has become a cause for alarm amongst consumer and worker advocates, who see it as […]