Payday & Title Lending

OCC Payday Lending Bulletin

05/24/18

The Office of Comptroller of the Currency put out a Bulletin this week encouraging banks to make short-term small-dollar installment loans to their customers—basically bank payday loans.  The OCC seems to envision 2-12 month amortizing, level-payment loans, but they're meant to be a payday substitute.  

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Call for Commercial Law Topics (and Jargon!)

12/16/17

For the spring semester, I am offering advanced commercial law and contracts seminar for UNC students, and have gathered resources to inspire students on paper topic selection as well as to guide what we otherwise will cover. But given the breadth of what might fit under the umbrella of the seminar's title, the students and I would greatly benefit from learning what Credit Slips readers see as the pressing issues in need of more examination in the Uniform Commercial Code, the payments world, and beyond.

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Guess Who's Supporting Predatory Lending?

08/10/17

Guess who’s sponsoring legislation to facilitate predatory lending? It’s not just the usual suspects from the GOP, but it looks like a number of centrist “New Democrats” are signing up to help predatory financial institutions evade consumer protections. 

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CFPB Politics Update

08/09/17

Time for a CFPB politics update:  FSOC veto, Congressional Review Act override of the arbitration rulemaking, Director succession line, and contempt of Congress all discussed below the break.

What happened to that FSOC Veto Threat?

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More Evidence that a For-Cause Removal of CFPB Director Corday Would Be Pretextual

02/03/17

If Trump is planning on attempting to remove CFPB Director Richard Cordray "for cause" he's hardly going about it in a smart way.  The Trump administration keeps generating more and more evidence that any for-cause removal would be purely pretextual, which strengthens Corday's hand were he to litigate the removal order (as he surely would).  

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New Study Tells Inside Story of how Local Communities use Ordinances to say ‘Enough’ to Payday Lenders

01/24/17

Robert Mayer of the University of Utah and I just finished an 18-month study of community approaches to controlling payday lending . The study concludes with ten lessons communities can use to pass similar ordinances on any subject matter. In The Power of Community Action: Anti-Payday Loan Ordinances in Three Metropolitan Areas, we document how local communities positively organize to control payday lending in their jurisdictions and thereby create important legal change.

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John Oliver and consumer law YouTube videos

08/22/16

I'm trying something new this year.

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Payday Lending Regulation: The Substitution Effect?

07/26/16

A common argument made against regulating small dollar credit products like payday loans is that regulation does nothing to address demand for credit, so consumers will simply substitute their consumption from payday loans to other products:  overdraft, title loans, refund anticipation loans, pawn shops, etc.

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Payday Rulemaking: Is Too Much Competition a Bad Thing?

06/02/16

The CFPB's proposed payday rule making is out.  There's a nice summary here.  

I'm going to reserve comment other than to note a critical implication of a rare area of agreement between the supporters and opponents of the payday rule:  it will result in a lot of payday lenders closing up shop.  That might be just what the industry needs.

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Auto Title Lending: Exploding Toasters

05/18/16

The CFPB has a new report out on auto title lending, and the findings are jaw-dropping. If ever there was a consumer financial product that looks like an exploding toaster, it is an auto title loan.  Default rates on auto title loans are one in three, with one in five resulting in a repossession.

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