CreditSlips

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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Too Big to Regulate? The Warren Debut

02/16/13

Elizabeth Warren’s questioning of financial regulators at her first Senate Banking Committee hearing got a lot of attention for her pointed question about when was the last time any of their agencies had taken a large bank to trial.  It was a telling exchange, but I think the attention it received overshadowed her even more interesting second question (here at 04:29):  why is the market capitaliz

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Forty-nine minutes of contempt (Argentina edition)

02/14/13

The briefs have been filed in NML v. Argentina (a complete set here), and the Second Circuit has revised the hearing schedule, expanding the time for oral argument on February 27 to a total of 49 minutes.

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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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Two very Important FTC Studies, One on Credit Reports and One on Debt Buyers

02/13/13

A recent FTC study of errors in credit reports is getting a lot of press. According to the most recent in a number of studies of the accuracy of credit reports, about 5% of U.S. consumers have an error on their credit report that is serious enough to increase their cost of credit. Although the credit industry is arguing that this is a small percentage (and I agree that this is a lot smaller than I expected), the head of the FTC does not consider it small.

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The State Legislative Process: It’s no Fun Watching Sausage Being Made

02/13/13

In a recent trip to testify before a state legislature, I was reminded of why one might want to avoid these types of interactions. First, it is no fun, second, is not required as a condition of my employment, and third, at least so far, no good ever comes of it.

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The Virtues of Price Caps

02/13/13

In the last post I discussed the potential benefits of price caps in the small loan market, one of which was to bring the price down to what consumer price shopping would produce if it were present in that market. Now I would like to turn to the potential benefit of price caps in even the most (albeit still quite imperfectly) price-competitive credit market, the mortgage market.

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Usury and the Loan Shark Myth

02/13/13

Consumer financial education, disclosure, and defaults all dispensed with in my prior posts, shall we move on to “substantive” regulation, dare I even say “usury”?

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The Legal Employment Market, Student Debt, and Legal Education Reform

02/12/13

There has been a great deal of press recently about the sorry state of the legal jobs market, student debt, and the irrelevance of legal education (see, e.g., here).  A lot of the thinking on these issues has struck me as incredibly ga-ga and muddled and as reflecting unrelated and pre-existing agendas about legal education, student debt, and the role of lawyers in society.

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