News Topic: Credit Policy & Regulation

Kiva.org is the on-line microlending network that allows anyone to lend $25 or more to individual low-income borrowers around the world for micro-enterprise and housing.   Kiva is an entirely different way of thinking about credit and financial ... Read full article

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing something promising with its anti-abuse authority under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.  It is going after credit industry exploitation of consumers, particularly ... Read full article

I have been working for a few years in developing and creating a consumer outreach website at MyConsumerTips.info .   The site is purely non-profit and has no sponsors or advertisers. It aims to simply provide consumers with “consumer tips” that change ... Read full article

Contracts professors, policymakers, consumer groups and others have become particularly interested in another post- AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion  case.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently agreed to an  en banc ... Read full article

The annual Federal Reserve report on Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data for 2011 paints a bleak picture.  Despite interest rates at or below 4%, mortgage lending volume continued its four-year decline.  The drop in mortgage lending was particularly ... Read full article

Although not always acknowledged expressly, exceptionalism is pervasive in bankruptcy scholarship. Some work makes no attempt to contexualize bankruptcy within the federal courts, apparently assuming its unique qualities (for example, the disinterest in ... Read full article

My oldest leaves for college in the morning. Yesterday, we were talking to him about his new bank account and how to use it responsibly to avoid overdrafts, fees, and such. The conversation gave me a new factor to consider in assessing the amount of ... Read full article

Check out this story in the New York Times about free-wheeling consumer credit in India . Much of the article focuses on how Indians are using consumer credit to pay for cosmetic surgery. At one point, I had a collection of online advertisements offering ... Read full article

My Georgetown colleague Rebecca Tushnet has a great post about a recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling, Brewer v. Missouri Title Loans, holding that an arbitration agreement in an auto title loan was unconscionable.  The case is important because it says ... Read full article

A  prior post  addressed a proposed amendment to Article 9's official comments stating that the date of an Article 9 filing relates back to the initial filing date even if the debtor did NOT authorize the filing at that time. This post returns to ... Read full article

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of giving priority to an Article 9 financing statement only from the date on which the debtor  actually authorizes the filing, and a proposed official comment contrary to this position . My colleague Lissa ... Read full article

While we’ve been blogging, Stevie has begun his dissertation fieldwork in Korea. He emailed Bill the other day: “Yesterday I opened a bank account here in Seoul, and conducted the entire interaction in Korean. For some reason, I don't get an ATM ... Read full article

My last post mentioned a column by Joe Nocera on debt collection practices. Nocera's column is entitled "Why People Hate the Banks," and it appears on the penultimate page of the national print edition of today's New York Times . ... Read full article

In the early part of this year, a new start-up called ZestCash launched. ... Read full article

The national mortgage settlement among federal and state regulators and major banks, announced with much fanfare on February 8, still has not produced an actual written settlement agreement, judging by the dead link on the settlement web page .  That ... Read full article

Wall Street Journal Reporter Jessica Silver-Greenberg casts a spotlight on the market for fertility treatment loans - including loans that enable the purchase of other women's eggs  - in the article "In Vitro a Fertile Niche for Lenders."  ... 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