News Topic: Credit & Debit Cards

The Seventh Circuit  Court of Appeals recently slammed Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart for his actions trying to get Mastercard and Visa to stop processing payments for Backpage, an advertising website whose ads include various adult services (some legal, ... Read full article

A regular trope sounded by opponents of consumer financial regulations is that the regulations have resulted in the disappearance of free checking. ... Read full article

The past year has seen two notable innovations in the payments world and a third is coming down the pike.  ApplePay was rolled out last spring, the EMV liability shift went into effect on October 1, and the Fed has convened a task force on designing a ... Read full article

Both sides in the interchange fee debate have pointed to a recent Richmond Fed study as evidence supporting their position ( here and here ). ... Read full article

Here's an opportunity to supervise a consumer financial protection clinic that has done some great work - information on the position and how to apply here .  ... Read full article

The Federal Reserve System has embarked on a project of exploring the possibility of faster retail payments in the United States.  A similar move has occurred with the UK Payments Council.  At the same time, the Electronic Payments Network is rolling out ... Read full article

In a recent case called Madden v. Marine Midland Funding , the Second Circuit ruled that a loan owned by a debt collector violated New York's usury statute.  The loan had been originally made by a national bank and was subsequently sold to the debt ... Read full article

Lately I have been teaching courses with names such as "Global and Economic Justice" and "History, Impacts and Regulation of Consumer Credit" instead of "Bankruptcy," "Secured Transactions" and "Chapter 11 ... Read full article

Clearly, the biggest surprise in consumer borrowing since the crash has been the explosive expansion of student loan debt. It has surpassed both auto lending and credit card lending. And, since it ties with Payday Lending and pre-crash sub-prime mortgage ... Read full article

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The revelation that 76 million JPMorgan Chase consumer accounts were compromised by hacking should be scaring the heck out of us. The Chase hacking is a r ed flag that hacking poses a real systemic risk to our banking system, and a national security risk ... Read full article

Interesting op-ed on digital wallets  by Edward Castronova and Joshua Fairfield in the NYT. I'm a little more skeptical. Thoughts follow the break. (1) We already live in a world of digital currency. ... Read full article

Apple Pay has been getting a lot of attention, and I hope to do a longer post on it, but for now let me highlight one possible issue that does not seem to have gotten any attention. I think Apple may have just become a regulated financial institution, ... Read full article

One of the competitors in the Great Mobile Payments Race is changing its name. Isis Wallet , a mobile payments joint venture of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile is changing its name to Softcard for fairly obvious reasons . Isis Wallet operates by having ... Read full article

At today's House Judiciary Committee hearing on Operation Choke Point it seemed that  Choke Point 's critics are conflating a fairly narrow DOJ civil investigation with separate general guidance given by prudential regulators.  In particular, ... Read full article

Pop quiz:  what do payday lenders have in common with on-line gun shops, escort services, pornography websites, on-line gambling and the purveyors of drug paraphrenalia or racist materials?   ... Read full article

Todd Zywicki, Geoff Manne and Julian Morris have an article on the effect of the Durbin Amendment .  Sigh.  No surprises here.  Zywicki et al. are making claims beyond what their data can support and in fact directly contradicted by their own data, which ... Read full article

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