Overall, the program has been working well, the Nobel laureate chronicles: -The uninsured rate has dropped sharply -Most employers are not (as previously feared) dropping coverage for employees -Costs are lower than expected And Krugman puts some recent bad news (about rising premiums, for instance) into perspective. Read Krugman's op-ed here.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's consideration of a rule requiring lenders to provide detailed data on loan applications, in an effort to prevent discrimination against small businesses and businesses owned by women and minorities. "To do that, the agency would require lenders to provide detailed data on loan applications, […]
Politico reports: The FCC has announced a series of eye-popping fines against companies over the past two years: Roughly $100 million against nearly a dozen firms for defrauding a phone subsidy program, $35 million against a Chinese company for selling illegal wireless jamming equipment, and $100 million against AT&T this June for throttling customers on […]
Here. Excerpt: * * * Trackers, which come in many forms including a single invisible pixel inserted into an email or the hyperlinks embedded inside a message, are frequently being used to detect when someone opens a message and even where that person is when the email is opened. By some estimates, trackers are now […]
S.I. Strong of Missouri has written Incentives for Large-Scale Arbitration: How Policymakers Can Influence Party Behaviour. Here's the abstract: At this point, the future of large-scale arbitration (i.e., class, mass and collective procedures) can best be described as mixed. On the one hand, class arbitration has been curtailed in the United States as a result […]
With so many avenues to challenge the use of forced arbitration clauses in consumer contracts closed off by Supreme Court precedent, plaintiffs tried another one: allege that so many credit card companies' parallel adoption of the clauses was collusive and therefore violated antitrust law. But the district court dismissed the challenge and yesterday the Second […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today posted its current rulemaking agenda. Its "current initiatives" address arbitration; payday, auto title, and similar lending products; pre-paid accounts; overdraft; debt collection; larger participants and non-depository lender registration; Women-owned, minority-owned, and small businesses data collection; mortgage servicing; and implementation of various mortgage rules. The CFPB announcement has a summary. […]
In response to our recent discussion of the TPP, alert reader Matthew Bruckner pointed out that NPR's Planet Money podcast covered the trade pact recently. Unfortunately, many of the aspects covered were the traditional tariff-related aspects of the deal rather than provisions like ISDS that make it so dangerous. And even as to ISDS, the reporters seem to […]
The Federal Trade Commission has approved final amendments to its Telemarketing Sales Rule, including a change that will help protect consumers from fraud by prohibiting four discrete types of payment methods favored by con artists and scammers. The rule changes will stop telemarketers from dipping directly into consumer bank accounts by using certain kinds of […]