News Topic: Consumer Finance

Consumer financial education , disclosure , and defaults all dispensed with in my prior posts, shall we move on to “substantive” regulation, dare I even say “usury”? ... Read full article

Over at VoxEU , economists Daniel Aronson and Eric French have a discussion about the their research of the effects of a minimum wage hike. ... Read full article

It’s National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW)!   Federal, state, local, and nonprofit consumer protection agencies and organizations are making extra efforts to promote consumer awareness .  First I have to get out of my system thoughts of Tom Lehrer’s ... Read full article

Now that my last few posts have bludgeoned consumer financial education and at least bloodied disclosure, and given that my suggestion of comprehension requirements is completely untested as a means of consumer protection for financial products, what ... Read full article

What if, instead of making the consumer smarter or the disclosures more comprehensible, as discussed in my last several posts, we made financial product disclosures smarter? ... Read full article

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Given the limitations of Disclosure 2.0 and Disclosure 2.5 I described in my last posts, what is to be done? To answer this question, we might first ask what financial product disclosure is attempting to achieve. Although disclosure has several aims, one ... Read full article

Thanks for having me back at Credit Slips! This week I’ll be blogging about two forms of credit that are increasingly popular: auto title lending and pawnshops. ... Read full article

From the February 9th Economist : ... Read full article

If financial education classes and lab-tested disclosures are unlikely to help consumers in their real-world financial decisions, what about field-tested targeted education/disclosure? Exciting work by Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse shows that ... Read full article

If, as I suggested in my last post, making the consumer smarter is hopeless, at least for those of us whose prenatal and early childhood environments can no longer be altered, what about disclosure?  Could point-of-sale disclosure equip consumers to make ... Read full article

In a recent trip to testify before a state legislature, I was reminded of why one might want to avoid these types of interactions. First, it is no fun, second, is not required as a condition of my employment, and third, at least so far, no good ever comes ... Read full article

There has been a great deal of press recently about the sorry state of the legal jobs market, student debt, and the irrelevance of legal education (see, e.g., here ).  A lot of the thinking on these issues has struck me as incredibly ga-ga and muddled and ... Read full article

I had a weird night’s sleep and then openned up my e-mail to find this headline from credit and collection news “Does The Consumer Bureau Harm Those It Claims to Protect? & Study Predicts Millions Will Die In Credit Card Red.” The immediate ... Read full article

The CFPB has come out with its long awaited qualified mortgage (QM) rulemaking under Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Act.  The QM rulemaking is by far the most important CFPB action to date and will play a crucial role in determining the shape of the US ... Read full article

Welcome to 2013 Credit Slips Readers! It’s time to think about our debtor/creditor future, what to keep and what to leave behind. Sometimes I ask my fellow bloggers if they made any financially-related resolutions but usually everyone say no, so this ... Read full article

There's a linguistic irony that "gift" is the German word for poison. What, then, should we make of the "gift card"?   Senator Richard Blumenthal's introduced new legislation, the Gift Card Consumer Protection Act (S.3636) ... Read full article