A few times I have caught Storage Wars , a television show on A&E. When storage units customers do not pay their fees, the contents are auctioned off by the storage unit company. The show follows professional treasure hunters who bid at these ... Read full article
Carter Dougherty of Bloomberg reports this morning that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is entering into an information-sharing agreement with state attorneys general, that will help states enforce consumer protection laws. ... Read full article
The CFPB is finally getting a Director , which enables it to exercise its full range of powers. It's good to see this Administration show some backbone. Better late than never, I guess, and Rich Cordray is a great pick. ... 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
Tomorrow, Katie Porter and I will be testifying at a subcommittee hearing for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. The title of the hearing is "Consumer Protection and Middle Class Wealth Building in an Age of Growing Household ... Read full article
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched the first project in its "Know Before You Owe" initiative with the release of proposed mortgage disclosures. While the CFPB did its homework in designing these forms, including getting ... Read full article
Over at American Banker is the text of Elizabeth Warren's farewell e-mail to the staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. My favorite line: "An honest market will give companies that provide fair value to their customers a chance to ... Read full article
Yesterday the Fed announced a settlement with Wells Fargo of claims that its subprime unit had 1) deliberately steered prime borrowers into higher-cost subprime mortgage refinancings and 2) falsified income documents to put subprime borrowers into ... Read full article
The Obama adminstration's CFPB proposal took a lot of flak (and almost cratered) because of the inclusion of the "plain vanilla" provision (from the work of Profs. Michael Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir), which would have ... Read full article
The Boston Herald has a piece questioning Elizabeth Warren's consumer bona fides because she worked on a 2008 Supreme court appeal for Traveller's Insurance involving the validity of Traveller's settlements for asbestos liability relating ... Read full article
