Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

CFPB What Have You Done for Me Lately? The Cash America Case, For One Thing

11/27/13

The CFPB just settled an enormous enforcement action against payday lender Cash America. Under the settlement, Cash America will pay $5 million in penalties and $14 million in refunds to overcharged customers.

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Another Myth of Consumer Law?

07/31/13

As the CFPB gears up to regulate arbitration clauses,
a timely article by Omri Ben-Shahar has been posted on ssrn.

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Who is Mel Watt?

05/08/13

On May 1, President Obama nominated Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the conservator for the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

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National Consumer Protection Week and Disclosure 3.0

03/06/13

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 song, National Brotherhood Week:

                Step up and shake the hand/Of someone you can’t stand . . .

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Disclosure 2.0: Disclosure in the Lab

02/18/13

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 good financial decisions? 

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A Final Pet Peeve: The Right to Consumer Financial Industry Data

02/13/13

Thank you to the Credit Slips team for allowing me to use their soapbox for the last few weeks.  I leave you with a final pet peeve: Why does the government have to rely on commercially-collected financial industry data sets or voluntary surveys of financial firms to discover the effects of policies the government has put in place? This is just embarrassing. The U.S. government has so little power over the financial industry – an industry that only exists by virtue of the full faith and credit, payments systems, FDIC insurance, etc.

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Which Consumer Financial Education Programs Are Most Effective?: Assuming a Fact Not in Evidence

02/12/13

Thank you to the Credit Slips team for inviting me to guest blog.  First I must warn the reader that I am not a real blogger (I’m a bit of a Luddite - I don’t even have a smartphone).  But I’m going to join the 21st Century for a bit here.  Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing my thoughts and some recent research pertinent to modes of consumer financial protection, from financial literacy education to policy defaults to product regulation.  As some of you already know, I have been critical of all of these.  But here I will also sug

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Challenge to CFPB Authority

01/31/13

In the wake of the D.C. Circuit's decision striking down recess appoints, Carter Dougherty at Bloomberg reports what may be the first example of a defendant raising the CFPB's lack of authority as a defense in an enforcement proceeding. Stay tuned.

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The Bubble According to Todd

01/25/13

Todd Zywicki has a long blog post criticizing the CFPB's Qualified Mortgage (QM) rule and using it as a jumping-off point for a call to transform the CFPB's leadership from a single Director to a commission.

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NLRB and CFPB: Recess Appointments

01/25/13

The DC Circuit's decision in
Noel Canning v. NLRB invalidated an National Labor Relations Board ruling on the grounds that three of the NLRB's five members were not validly appointed, so the NLRB lacked the necessary quorum to act.  The DC Circuit's held on two separate grounds that the NLRB members were not validly appointed.

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