Still at work, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today filed two complaints and proposed final judgments in federal court against four California-based credit repair companies and three individuals for misleading consumers and charging illegal fees. The CFPB alleges that the companies charged illegal advance fees for credit repair services, and also misrepresented their ability to […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. The 22 words consists of the following statement, to appear on Facebook's help page: “We use tools to identify and store links shared in messages, including a count of the number of times links are shared.” As a general matter, I am skeptical of settlements that provide only a disclosure on […]
That's the name of this New England Journal of Medicine article by Benjamin D. Sommers, Atul A. Gawande, and Katherine Baicker. They looked carefully at the literature asking whether having health insurance improves health outcomes. The authors also looked at a range of variables, including the quality of insurance. Here are excerpts from of their conclusions: One question experts […]
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Read health-care journalist Sarah Kliff's article titled Page 48 is the most important page in the CBO report. The whole thing is worth reading. Here's a key takeaway: The CBO report is a dense 49-page document that you can read here. But you can find its clearest explanation of the Senate bill on page 48. This is […]
The decision is Calpers v. ANZ Securities. The vote is 5 to 4, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, and Justice Ginsburg writing the dissent. Skipping all its nuances, the American Pipe rule provides generally that the statute of limitations for absent class members is tolled from the filing of a class-action complaint until the […]
by Jeff Sovern As we reported a couple weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Henson v. Santander that debt buyers are not automatically debt collectors under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. However, debt buyers which have debt collection as the principal purpose of their business should still qualify as debt collectors under the statute (the […]
Paige Marta Skiba and Jean Xiao of Vanderbilt have written Consumer Litigation Funding: Just Another Form of Payday Lending? 80 Law and Contemporary Problems (2017). Here is the abstract: This article provides a side-by-side comparison of payday lending and consumer litigation funding in order to aid policymakers. Funding has similarities with payday lending because they are […]
David Hilzenrath at the Project on Government Oversight reports here about what strikes me as a bunch of future disasters waiting to happen. An excerpt: When makers of medical devices learn that one of their products has malfunctioned in a way that could kill or seriously injure people, they are required to file a report with the […]
by Jeff Sovern Some congressional Republicans have said that the CFPB was asleep at the switch when it came to the Wells Fargo unauthorized account scandal, and that it just piggy-backed on the LA City Attorney, which was the first governmental office to bring a case against Wells for the accounts. But now the LA […]