Here (login required). An excerpt: Likewise, there was initially deep skepticism inside the banking industry about the CFPB's arbitration study, and there is still a belief among industry insiders that the agency's research is likely to lead to new regulations. * * * But over the last few months, industry observers have been relatively pleasedwith they […]
According to this article by Elizabeth Norton, the Federal Trade Commission says that up to 80% of the victims of consumer scams are elderly. Why? Older people tend to look at things in a positive light: One explanation may lie in a brain region that serves as a crook detector. Called the anterior insula, this […]
Here. They call it an inforgraphic, but it's really a comic, though not comical. From DirectLendingSolutions.com.
Over at Credit Slips, Alan White has a great post about what he loves about the microlending non-profit, Kiva. He then discusses microlending more generally. Kiva is "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty." "Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions," Kiva says, it "lets […]
Bad floods damage a lot of cars, and then some used car sellers want to sell those damaged cars to unsuspecting customers without disclosing the damage. This happened after Katrina (go, for instance, go here and here). Holly Petreaus, the head of Servicemember Affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has posted this warning about used […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a Ph.D candidate from the University of Amsterdam, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, who is researching privacy regulation and behavioral targeting. He asked me if I could refer him to a book that explores when disclosure is an appropriate response to consumer protection problems […]
In addition to the exciting cert grants from the Supreme Court today in the gay marriage cases out of New York and California, don't overlook Oxford Health Plans v. Sutter, a case also taken today raising a question about the availability of class arbitration. The case is a followup to the decision in Stolt-Nielsen v. […]
by Brian Wolfman In a pay-for-delay settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic company that has challenged the brand-name company's patent to stay out of the market. Some early antitrust challenges to these settlements succeeded, but later court of appeals' rulings gave them a green light. Then, as we discussed in this post last July, […]
by Brian Wolfman The FDA says it violates federal law for a drug company sales rep to promote a prescription drug for an off-label use (that is, a use not approved by the FDA). So, a rep is convicted of a misdemeanor in federal district court for promoting a prescription drug for an off-label use. […]
Dee Pridgen of Wyoming has written Sea Changes in Consumer Financial Protection: Stronger Agency and Stronger Laws. I read this one before it was posted and found it particularly useful in pulling together some recent themes in consumer law and explaining how the Dodd-Frank Act's anti-predatory lending rules are based on behavioral economics, as opposed to […]