…is the title of this op-ed from the NYT over the weekend. The piece highlights a recent Pew study finding that most wealthy Americans think that poor people have it easy then debunks that myth with some sobering numbers. These include the fact that an estimated 11 million Americans work without making enough to move […]
by Jeff Sovern In our casebook, we quote a 1982 article that reports on a credit scoring system that took into account, in calculating the score, the first letter of the applicant's last name. Credit scoring has evolved since then but maybe history is repeating itself or at least rhyming. Today's Times includes an article, […]
The latest FTC settlement with a company that was deceiving consumers requires the company and its head "to turn over virtually all of their assets to the agency, and prohibit[s] them from deceiving consumers in any future sales pitches." The FTC reports: Cream Group, Inc., which operates as Oro Marketing, and its mastermind Sami Charchian […]
Check out Meredith v. CVS Health, a lawsuit just filed in California state court. The suit alleges that CVS promotes a nutritional supplement to help treat or prevent macular degeneration based on a National Institutes for Health study, even though the supplement doesn't contain the ingredients that NIH found might be beneficial. The Center for […]
Here. The subtitle reads: Consumer-Debt Adviser Howard Dvorkin Has Financial Links to Firms Such as Payday Lenders That Often Drive People Deeper into Debt. And here's the beginning of the article: One of the most prominent advocates for consumer debt relief has ties to firms that can leave people deeper in debt. Howard S. Dvorkin is […]
Last month, we recommended an NPR story discussing the problem of collections against low-income hospital patients. In response to this problem (as reported by the New York Times), "The Obama administration has adopted sweeping new rules to discourage nonprofit hospitals from using aggressive tactics to collect payments from low-income patients. Under the rules, nonprofit hospitals […]
Lauren Willis (of Loyola Los Angeles) and Theresa Amato (of the Fair Contracts Project) have a great op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times on what to do about consumer financial illiteracy. "There are dozens of entities devoted to educating you about all things financial," they write, "[b]ut none of it is working very well." Financial […]
Resolving a split among the federal courts of appeals in favor of consumers, the Supreme Court held today in Jesinoski v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., that a consumer may exercise the right to rescind a loan under the federal Truth in Lending Act simply by notifying the creditor rather than (as the creditor contended and […]
From The Hill: On the heels of President Obama’s call for stronger cybersecurity protections on Monday, Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.) called on regulators to force banks to issue chip-and-PIN debit and credit cards to better protect American consumers from data breaches. “The President’s measure takes strong steps towards ensuring cards used by the federal government […]