I just had the pleasure of reading Duke Law Professor Sara Sternberg Greene's paper The Bootstrap Trap. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the intersection of consumer credit and poverty law.
This Tuesday I'm going to be testifying about "fintechs" before the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit. My written testimony on this impossibly broad topic is here.
Guess who’s sponsoring legislation to facilitate predatory lending? It’s not just the usual suspects from the GOP, but it looks like a number of centrist “New Democrats” are signing up to help predatory financial institutions evade consumer protections.
Time for a CFPB politics update: FSOC veto, Congressional Review Act override of the arbitration rulemaking, Director succession line, and contempt of Congress all discussed below the break.
I'm testifying before the Senate Banking Committee this week about "Fostering Economic Growth: The Role of Financial Institutions in Local Communities". It's the undercard for the Comey hearing. The big point I'm making are that the problem is not one of economic growth, but economic distribution. While the US economy has grown by 9% in real terms since Dodd-Frank, real median income has fallen by 0.6%. That's pretty grim. The gains have all gone to the top 10% and particularly the top 1%.
As the subprime foreclosure crisis grinds down slowly (there are still roughly 3 million pre-crisis subprime mortgages outstanding, many of them delinquent), and the HAMP program sunsets, the time has come to appraise the total damage done.
Four core federal consumer financial laws—the Truth in Lending Act (and Reg Z), the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (and Reg E), the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (and Reg X) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (and
