News Topic: Consumer Finance

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

This is a newly published paper  in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal  that I was lucky to work on with Daniel McCue and Eric Belsky at the ... Read full article

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 ). ... Read full article

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. ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

The WSJ reports on the latest development in the implementation of the OCC's mortgage servicing fraud consent orders.  It seems that the banks will have OCC approved "independent" foreclosure review consultants (chosen and paid by the ... Read full article

The "corporations are people, my friend" line was quite the momement. But as bad as it sounded, Mitt had a theoretical point. People (as well as other corporations) own corporations and people work for corporations.  The problem isn't that ... Read full article

I’ve argued in my posts so far that transparency in property/casualty insurance markets is woefully inadequate.  Transparency, however, is not always a particularly good solution to a regulatory problem. The most visible controversy in the ... Read full article

The International Association of Consumer Law, with participants present from six continents, has been meeting at Brunel University in West London the last few days, hearing presentations from regulators, industry representatives, consumer advocates, and ... Read full article