Consumer Finance

American Capitalism: Profit, But Fairly

01/16/12

Adam Davidson wrote up an interesting apologia for Wall Street in the NY Times last week, which I think is ultimately a call for better regulation, rather than bank-hating.

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The Consumer Finance Pantheon?

01/13/12

In putting together a revised syllabus for my consumer finance course this semester, I was struck with how different this nascent field is from established courses like Contracts.  No matter what Contracts casebook one uses to teach, there are a bunch of well-established chestnuts that everyone knows:  Hadley v. Baxendale, for example, or Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture, Raffles v. Wichelhaus, Frigaliment, Lucy Lady Duff Gordon, Hawkins v. McGee, or Jacobs & Young v. Kent (and one could go on and on).

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Foreclosure Timelines and Mortgage Delinquency: More Evidence from Bankruptcy

01/12/12

At the end of a lively session yesterday at Duke Law School featuring Professor Stephen Ware of University of Kansas Law School, there was a brief discussion of whether shorter foreclosure timelines and clearer rules would promote more workouts of delinquent mortgages.

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What is the Relationship Between Credit Cards and Mortgage Delinquency?

01/10/12

Previously I mentioned this new paper on homeowners in bankruptcy in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. The central goal of the paper was to investigate what makes homeowners more or less likely to have mortgage troubles as they head into bankruptcy. One of the notable findings is that, across all the models, credit access had a significant effect on keeping mortgages current and avoiding foreclosure initiation (specifics l

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BROKE: A New Book on Consumer Debt and Bankruptcy

01/09/12

Just in time for New Year's resolutions on 1) reading more, 2) paring back your own debt, and 3) learning more about consumer bankruptcy to help you do your job (if you are a lawyer, judge, or academic, media, etc), the book, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class was released from Stanford University Press.

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Buy Here Pay Here Dealerships

01/03/12

The LA Times did a three-part series this fall on what they call "Buy Here Pay Here" car dealerships. (Here is Part One, Part Two, and Part Three).

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The Value(s) of Foreclosure Law Reform?

12/21/11

As Alan White reported recently, the Uniform Law Commission in the U.S. has named a committee to consider the need for and feasibility of proposing a uniform foreclosure act and to report back to the ULC by early 2012.

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Change.org Petition Plays Part in BoA Debit Fee Reversal

11/07/11

In early October of 2011, Bank of America announced that it would begin charging its customers an additional $5 users fee for using its debit cards. In my financial literacy class the weekend after the announcement, some students were resigned to it, some furious, but we all vowed to switch banks if we banked at BofA. Yet we all also knew what would happen next, if history was any indication. Other banks would follow suit and eventually we’d all get charged the fee, which would just go up even more over time.

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Do You Remember How Overdraft Protection, Overdraft Fees, and Free Checking Used To Work?

10/25/11

Calling everyone in the over-40 set to help me remember something. When dealing with those old-fashioned things called “checks,” how did your own overdraft protection used to work?  My recollection is that, back in the day, as long as a person had a certain level of creditworthiness, the bank used to cover your check in a discretionary manner.

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