by Jeff Sovern A fellow named Eric Grover had a piece atacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Washington Times this week titled "CFPB’s unchecked power." A line at the end of the essay explains "Eric Grover is a principal at Intrepid Ventures." I had never heard of Intrepid Ventures, but their web site […]
The cancellation of indebtedness generally produces income for federal and state income tax purposes. But as LA Times writer Jim Puzzanghera explains, "in 2007, Congress enacted the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act to give struggling homeowners a break. If the debt is forgiven because of a drop in a home's value or a decline in […]
In July, we wrote about the Ninth Circuit's rejection of a settlement of claims that Kellogg's had misrepresented that kids could improve their attentiveness in school by nearly 20 percent by eating Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast. The court held that the cy pres was not properly related to the claims and the class, and […]
We reported earlier on the national mortgage fraud settlement between the federal government, state attorneys general, and the five largest mortgage servicers. (Go here and here, for instance.) The settlement's official website has lots of information, including an executive summary, which sets out some of the settlement's key terms. The summary discusses the billions of […]
Yesterday, we posted on President Obama's statement that if other means of curbing corporate election spending fail, he would consider a constitutional amendment to overrule the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The President thought it possible that the Court would itself overrule Citizens United, but that seems unlikely in the near term in light of […]
Read this AP story. Here's an excerpt: Patient after patient asked: Is eating organic food, which costs more, really better for me? Unsure, Stanford University doctors dug through reams of research to find out — and concluded there’s little evidence that going organic is much healthier, citing only a few differences involving pesticides and antibiotics. […]
As explained here, President Obama recently posted to the on-line community reddit that he could support a constitutional amendment to overrule the Supreme Court's controversial 2010 Citizens United ruling that unleased corporate campaign spending as never before. Here's what the President said: Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something […]
We have previously posted about the use of eminent domain as a tool for saving the homes of people whose mortages remain underwater as a result of the mortgage meltdown and the effects of the economic depression (go, for instance, here and here). Now, read this article by Ben Hallman about the political (and possibly […]
As this article by Jared Bernstein explains, corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product has passed where it was prior to the economic recession, but compensation as a percentage of gross domestic product is far lower that pre-recession levels. See the graph below.
by Jeff Sovern We have blogged many times about the Republican call for the CFPB to have a commission-structure, rather than a director (see, for example, here). That call has been spearheaded by Senator Shelby. So that makes it all the more surprising to note that during the Senate's consideration of what became the Dodd-Frank […]