CreditSlips

Back in April, I posted about Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson investigating allegations that Accretive Health Care aggressively collected debts from hospital patients. These allegations included claims that Accreive was obtaining payments from people in emergency rooms and from their hospital bedsides.

The English High Court just ruled in Assenagon Asset Management S.A. v. Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Limited (formerly Anglo Irish Bank) that a popular technique used to pressure bondholders to participate in a debt restructuring, as deployed by Anglo Irish in late 2010, violated English law and the terms of the Trust Deed.

On-line lenders who are not tribal or offshore claim that they need the same lack of oversight that the tribal and onshore on-line lenders are getting. Otherwise, it isn’t fair to them.  Hmmm….. Fairness is as fairness does. Keep in mind that these on- line loans:

- accrue interest at twice the rate of storefront payday  loans or about 800-1,000% per annum, and 

-are designed so the fee is paid automatically out of the customer’s bank account, …over and over again, but the loan principal is never repaid. 

Matthew Yglesias has a fantastic piece about the Barofsky-Geithner proxy debate on the financial crisis.  Read it here.

The only thing I would add is to note how this same debate continued through the mortgage servicing scandal and the debate over the CFPB.