by Brian Wolfman We've been covering the congressional debate over interest rates on students loans. (Go, for instance, here and here.) On Friday, President Obama signed the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013. It will bring most undergraduate loan rates below 4%. (Those rates were at 3.4% before July 1, when they doubled because Congress […]
by Paul Alan Levy A hundred fifty dollars. That is all it would take for the American Postal Workers Union to hire an outside mail service through which every one of the candidates in its internal union election, slated to begin one month from today, could email multiple campaign messages to every member for whom […]
by Jeff Sovern As I have noted before, payday lending and deposit advances present a conundrum for me: how to permit those who genuinely have a short-term borrowing need and who can't get the money elsewhere to borrow without creating a long-term debt trap. Recently I listened to hearing held by the Senate Special Committee […]
Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Corvello v. Wells Fargo that when a bank tells a borrower it will modify his loan if certain conditions are met under the Treasury Department's Home Affordable Modification Program (“HAMP”), that promise is enforceable. When Phillip Corvello applied for a home loan modification, Wells Fargo set up a trial […]
by Jeff Sovern I figure if it's good enough for the CFPB, it's good enough for us: I'm part of a team, along with other professors and the Hugh L Carey Center for Dispute Resolution here at the Law School, that is crafting a survey on consumer understanding of arbitration clauses. Unlike the CFPB survey, […]
As this story in the Guardian explains, Wal-Mart has agreed in a settlement to pay the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration a 190K fine and to improve worker safety at 2,800 of its stores. Here's an excerpt: Walmart has agreed to improve safety conditions at more than 2,800 stores in 28 US states after […]
The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department "has issued subpoenas to banks and other companies that handle payments for an array of financial offerings, ramping up an investigation that has been under way for several months." The investigation reportedly is focusing on companies that process payments for online payday lenders. Read the full story.
That's the name of this opinion piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel. It piece says that, in the U.S., "[a]s of 2011, nearly half the students enrolled in four-year programs — and more than 70 percent of students in two-year programs — failed to earn their degrees within that time, with many dropping out because of […]
We have been following the litigation over swipe fees–the fees that the card companies impose on merchants each time a credit or debit card is used. Go, for instance, here and here. A major concern is that if part of the swipe fee is the product of anti-competitive behavior or legislation or regulation enacted at the behest […]
Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius of the Institute for Information Law (University of Amsterdam) has written Consent to Behavioural Targeting in European Law – What are the Policy Implications of Insights from Behavioural Economics? Here is the abstract: Behavioural targeting is the monitoring of people’s online behaviour to target advertisements to specific individuals. European law requires […]