Credit & Debit Cards

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 red flag that hacking poses a real systemic risk to our banking system, and a national security risk as well. Frankly, I find this stuff a lot scarier than either ISIS or our still largely unregulated shadow banking space.  

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, unwittingly. Basically, I think Apple is now a "service provider" for purposes of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which means Apple is subject to CFPB examination and UDAAP. 

Here's the argument. Be warned:  this is a romp through some legal definitions. 

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, Rep. Issa attempted to tie them together by noting that the DOJ referenced such guidance in its Choke Point subpoenas, but that's quite different than actually bringing a civil action on such a basis (or on the basis of "reputational risk"), which the DOJ has not done.  

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 shows that some of the "effects" of Durbin preceded the enactment and effective date of the Amendment.   

Monday was our last day of classes. This semester I taught a seminar about the role of consumer credit in the United States' economy and society through the lens of consumer bankruptcy (primarily utilizing data and papers from various iterations of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project; find info about the seminar, which was designed by Katie Porter, here).