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Does the Obama White House truly stand for consumer financial protection, or will it support Wall Street when it thinks no one is looking?  That's the question that the Supreme Court served up today.  The Supreme Court is considering whether to hear an appeal in a critical consumer protection case called Midland Funding v. Madden. This is one of the most important consumer financial protection case the Supreme Court has considered in years.

Note from Katie Porter: This guest post is from Jennifer Song, senior staff attorney at the California Monitor Program. Jennifer pitched in and attended this workshop, and I hope Credit Slips readers will enjoy hearing about her experiences in a short series of posts. 

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.

The CFPB has come out with its long awaited qualified
mortgage (QM) rulemaking under Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Act.  The QM rulemaking is by far the most important
CFPB action to date and will play a crucial role in determining the shape of
the US housing finance market going forward. The QM rulemaking also rep