By Scott Nelson The nation's three big credit-reporting companies have tremendous power over American consumers and collect the most sensitive data about us. With that great power should go great responsibility to protect that information. Now comes news, via CNN, that one of the big three, Equifax, discovered on July 29 that between May and […]
Center for Science in the Public Interest's longtime president, Mike Jacobson, is stepping down next week. NPR reports: "Michael Jacobson invented a new style of food activism. For four decades, he led the fight against 'junk food.'" Read NPR's full story, which includes some interesting history about CSPI, here.
by Paul Alan Levy Today we filed our brief on behalf of three anonymous Internet users who object to the breadth of the proposed orders submitted by the Government and by DreamHost, each spelling out their alternative versions of the how Chief Judge Robert Morin had articulated his ruling that enforced a narrowed search warrant […]
The House yesterday passed a bipartisan bill, called the “Self Drive Act,” addressing driverless cars. Among other things, the bill would allow car companies to introduce as many as 100,000 such vehicles a year — exempted from safety standards while the technology is developing. At the same time, the bill would bar states from implementing […]
The House of Representatives Financial Services subcommittee is holding a hearing this morning on HR 2359, entitled the "FCRA Liability Harmonization Act," which would reduce consumer remedies for credit reporting abuses. It would impose a $500,000 cap on damages in class actions brought under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and eliminate punitive damages in individual […]
From Paul Bland in HuffPo, CFPB Rule Fight Forces Senators to Choose: Military Families or Big Banks. Excerpt: When Gary Childress of Raleigh, North Carolina learned in July 2008 that he was being deployed to Iraq as part of his Army National Guard service, one of the things he did before reporting for duty was to […]
That's the issue addressed in The Price of Ignorance: The Constitutional Cost of Fees for Access to Electronic Public Court Records by Stephen Schultze. Here's the abstract: The United States federal judiciary maintains a system called PACER, “Public Access to Court Electronic Records.” PACER is the public gateway into the electronic repository for documents filed in federal […]
Brian D. Feinstein a Bigelow Fellow at Chicago has written Judging Judicial Foreclosure. Here is the abstract: For the third time in the last several decades, policymakers are contemplating an overhaul of mortgage-finance regulations. Despite the considerable attention paid to how ex ante regulations affect the availability of credit and the appropriateness of the mortgage […]
Many have probably already seen yesterday's article in the New York Times about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's popularity getting in the way of Republicans' efforts to weaken it, but just in case… Relying on emails and other documents obtained in public records requests, the article describes the CFPB's strategy to shield itself from the […]
by Jeff Sovern Housing Wire reports on mortgage origination costs in a report headlined MBA: The cost to produce a mortgage falls closer to historic lows, with a subhead reading "Independent mortgage bank production profitability improves." Reports like this make it difficult to justify claims that the CFPB is significantly adding to lending costs.