CreditSlips

There's a linguistic irony that "gift" is the German word for poison. What, then, should we make of the "gift card"?  

Senator Richard Blumenthal's introduced new legislation, the Gift Card Consumer Protection Act (S.3636) that aims to close up the loopholes in existing gift card regulation and to protect consumers with gift cards when the retailer goes bankrupt. The legislation has a few moving parts:

In the Argentine appeal?

This weekend I found myself reading an 1829 edition of American Jurist and Law Magazine (it's a long story, but says much about my social life), and came across the following:

Anna Gelpern has already posted on the pari passu wipeout of Argentina. As she noted, NML got pretty much everything it wanted. By contrast, the exchange bondholders got no love whatsoever. The district judge dismissed their argument that it was unfair for NML to get 100 cents on the dollar when they had received only 30.

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 when business models involve using confusing terms that disclosure cannot adequately address.  See my paper on this topic. So I was not surprised to see George Will attacking this development.   We can't have smart, effective consumer protec