A lot of the criticism of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student loan forgiveness proposal has focused on how it's not fair to give loan forgiveness to current borrowers when past borrowers repaid their debts. That criticism overlooks the enormous boost ... Read full article
I'll be testifying on Tuesday at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on housing finance that is focused on Chairman Crapo's reform outline. My written testimony may be found here . Suffice it to say, I'm skeptical. I argue that a ... Read full article
An unsustainable run-up in consumer housing debt and other debt was a fundamental structural cause of the 2008 global financial c ... Read full article
This working paper is a longitudinal empirical study of lower-income homeowners, including a subset of bankruptcy filers, produced with an interdisciplinary team of cross-campus colleagues, including Professor Roberto Quercia , director of UNC's ... Read full article
Historian Ed Balleisen and I have just posted a paper of interest to Credit Slips readers who are interested in consumer protection, financial crises, and inputs into post-crisis policymaking more generally. I will let the abstract speak for itself: ... Read full article
Before it was the global financial crisis, we called it the subprime crisis. The slow, painful recovery, and the ever-widening income and wealth inequality, are the results of policy choices made before and after the crisis. Before 2007, legislators and ... Read full article
Various tax law scholars have commented on the tax fraud allegations in the recent New York Times story. Equally important is the story's reminder that our housing finance system, and the real estate fortunes it has spawned, have depended for nearly ... Read full article
The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 is a key piece of fair lending legislation. It requires mortgage lenders to report data on loan applications and loans funded that enables both government and private groups to monitor lending patterns for ... Read full article
As the subprime foreclosure crisis grinds down slowly (there are still roughly 3 million pre-crisis subprime mortgages outstanding, many of them delinquent), and the HAMP program sunsets, the time has come to appraise the total damage done. ... Read full article
How much in punitive damages is enough to punish unlawful conduct and deter its repetition? $45 million was one bankruptcy court's opinion , in the case of a wrongful home foreclosure and eviction in knowing violation of the automatic stay. ... Read full article
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas 5th) has an alternative fact problem. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Hensarling alleged that " Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically ... Read full article
Credit Slips is delighted to welcome first-time guest blogger, Professor Gary Neustadter . A renowned innovative teacher, Professor Neustadter specializes in debtor-creditor law, contracts, consumer protection, and legal practice. ... Read full article
The headlines look pretty bad: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals held the CFPB's structure to be unconstitutional in a case call PHH v. CFPB, which deals with kickbacks in captive private mortgage reinsurance arrangements allegedly in violation of the ... Read full article
A new paper by Franceso D'Acunto and Albert Rossi, both at the University of Maryland's Department of Finance, contends that the Dodd-Frank Act resulted in "a substantial redistribution of credit from middle-class households to wealt ... Read full article
Over on Twitter, Michael Barr noticed that there's an eerie similarity between Wells Fargo employees team members being incentivized to open up unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts for consumers and another practice that got Wells in ... Read full article
A new CMBS issuance is set to test whether regulators will treat the 5% retained credit risk under Dodd-Frank as loans or bonds . The difference matters because there are different capital charges for loans and bonds. If regulators treat the retained ... Read full article
The Federal Housing Finance Agency has finally announced a program to reduce principal balances of distressed home mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, eight years into the foreclosure crisis. Too little, too late would be an understatement to ... Read full article
Tara Twomey is just a keen observer of the consumer finance world, and she recently alerted me to a trend. Reverse mortgages are being aggressively hawked as a valuable financial planning tool, and the media is picking up the story. Even the reverse ... Read full article
As California Monitor, my staff and I fielded tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, questions from homeowners. The hardest conversations were the easiest from a legal perspective. If someone's home was foreclosed in California, we ... Read full article
