“Assessing the Optimism of Payday Loan Borrowers”

That's the title of this article by Ronald Mann. Here's the abstract: This essay compares the results from a survey administered to payday loan borrowers at the time of their loans to subsequent borrowing and repayment behavior. It thus presents the first direct evidence of the accuracy of payday loan borrowers’ understanding of how the […]

Potentially significant class action on Supreme Court’s conference for tomorrow

by Brian Wolfman Last September, the Whirlpool Corporation filed a cert petition in Whirlpool Corp. v. Glazer. The case has been on hold pending the Supreme Court's decision in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, which was issued this past Wednesday. (Go here and here for our posts on the Comcast ruling.) Now that Comcast has come down, […]

Hoofnagle & Whittington Paper on Free Offers

The prolific Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley and Jan Whittington of the Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington have written The Price of 'Free': Accounting for the Cost of the Internet's Most Popular Price, forthcoming in 61 UCLA Law Review (2014). Here's the abstract: Offers of “free” services abound on the internet. […]

Bales & Gerano Paper: Oddball Arbitration

Richard A. Bales and Mark B. Gerano, both of Northern Kentucky have written Oddball Arbitration, 30 Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal (2013). Here's the abstract: Congress passed the FAA in 1925 to resolve commercial disputes involving merchants. Since then, the Supreme Court has dramatically expanded the scope of the FAA and applied it in […]

More on the CFPB Auto Financing Rules: A Reply to Christopher Willis

by Jeff Sovern Earlier this week, I commented on car dealer opposition to the CFPB's auto financing rules.  Chris Willis replied on Ballard Spahr's informative CFPB Monitor Blog.  I want to respond to two of Chris's points: first, that compliance, policing, and later enforcement steps will increase the cost of credit; and second, that dealers […]

Expansion of CFPB consumer complaint database

From a CFPB press release this morning: Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) goes live with the nation’s largest public database of federal consumer financial complaints, opening up to consumers across the country information on more than 90,000 individual complaints on financial products and services. . . . Today’s launch expands the Consumer Complaint […]

Walmart Sequel – More SCOTUS Hostility to Class Actions

Today the Supreme Court ruled in Comcast Corp. v. Behrens that an antitrust class action was improperly certified because Justice Scalia and four other Justices found the plaintiffs' damage theory inadequately supported by expert testimony.  Others will no doubt have more to say on this, but I found the majority opinion transparently result-oriented, and disturbing […]

Large multinational corporations pay far less in U.S. corporate income tax than they used to

This analysis by Jia Yang explains that large U.S. companies with operations abroad pay far less in U.S. corporate income taxes than they used to. For instance, Yang writes, in 1969, corporate giant Procter and Gamble (based in Cincinnati) paid 40% of its total profits in U.S. corporate income taxes, while today it pays about […]