A coalition of 20 Attorneys General sent a letter today urging U.S. Senate leaders not to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Arbitration Rule, which stops companies from forcing consumers to sign away their legal rights. The press release of the Massachusetts Attorney General explains: The House recently passed a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that […]
Josh Lauer has written Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Here's the publisher's description: The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing […]
Then take a look at this story from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity: Who is killing the CFPB’s arbitration rule? Excerpt: The financial industry’s hefty investment in the campaigns of House members appeared to pay off this week when that chamber voted to kill a new rule that allows consumers to file class-action lawsuits […]
As we reported at the time, here, in 2015 the Second Circuit held that the National Bank Act, which preempts state usury laws regulating the interest a national bank may charge on a loan, does not preempt state usury law after the national bank has sold or otherwise assigned the loan to a company that […]
Here, by Kate Berry. The sources for that information mostly consist of unnamed "experts," but here's a quote that may shed some light on who one of the experts is: "There is no way that Cordray is going back home to Ohio without" a payday rule, said Isaac Boltansky, a policy analyst at Compass Point Research […]
by Jeff Sovern Regular blog readers will recall consumer law expert Gene DeSantis's travails with TD Bank from his remarks a couple of weeks ago. The post also launched a Twitter debate. Despite his consumer law expertise and three or four calls to TD, including conversations with supervisors, Gene hit a stone wall, after which he complained […]
by Jeff Sovern Then take a look at the Consumer Bureau Action Tracker created by Allied Progress. For example, the CFPB has brought 95 enforcement actions affecting Texas, home state of CFPB critic and House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling. Or if you want to know how many debt collection enforcement actions the Bureau has brought, […]
by Paul Alan Levy This past spring, Twitter garnered significant attention, and widespread praise, for a lawsuit it brought against the Trump Administration this past spring to block enforcement of an administrative summons seeking to identify the owners of a Twitter account purporting to reflect criticisms by current employees in Customs and Border Control. The […]
The Wall Street Journal, reporting on data compiled by the National Center for State Courts, reports that State restrictions, increasing cost, and a long campaign by businesses have discouraged plaintiffs from filing tort suits. Tort cases (primarily auto, medical malpractice, and product liability cases) declined from 16% of civil filings in state courts in 1993 […]
by Jeff Sovern As expected but still sad.