Usury 2.0: Toward a Universal Ability-to-Repay Requirement

There's bi-partisan legislation pending that would prohibit the practice of installment lenders sending out unsolicited live convenience check loan:  you get an unsolicited check in the mail.  If you cash it, you've entered into a loan agreement.  

The debate about check loans has turned on whether consumers understand what they're getting into.  The legislation's sponsors say consumers don't understand all the terms and conditions, while the installment lender trade association, the American Financial Services Association, argues that there's no problem with live check loans because all the terms are clearly disclosed in large type font.  

This debate about consumer understanding and clarity of disclosure totally misses the point.  The key problem with check loans is that they are being offered without regard for the consumer's ability to repay.  For some consumers, check loans might be beneficial.  But for other they're poison.  The problem is that check loans are not underwritten for ability-to-repay, which is a problem for a product that is potentially quite harmful.  Ability to repay is the issue that should be discussed regarding check loans, not questions about borrower understanding.  Indeed, this is not an issue limited to check loans.  Instead, it is an issue that cuts across all of consumer credit.  Rather than focus narrowly on check loans, Congress should consider adopting a national ability-to-repay requirement for all consumer credit (excluding federal student loans).  

Seeking nominations for the Grant Gilmore Award

The American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers seeks nominations for scholarly articles to be considered for the Grant Gilmore Award. It is not awarded every year, but when it is, the main criteria is "superior writing in the field of commercial finance law."  I am chairing the award committee this year, so please email me or message me on Twitter before December 14 to ensure your suggestion is considered. Especially eager to get suggestions of articles written by newer members of the academy that might otherwise be missed.

Reflections on the foreclosure crisis 10th anniversary

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 regulators cheered on risky subprime mortgage lending as the "democratization of credit." High-rate, high-fee mortgages transferred income massively from working- and middle-class buyers and owners of homes to securities investors.

After the crisis, policymakers had a choice, to allocate the trillions in wealth losses to investors, borrowers or taxpayers. U.S. policy was for taxpayers to lend to banks until the borrowers had finished absorbing all the losses. The roughly $400 billion taxpayers lent out to banks via the TARP bailout was mostly repaid, apart from about $30 billion in incentives paid to the mortgage industry to support about 2 million home loan modifications, and $12 billion spent to rescue the US auto industry. The $190 billion Fannie/Freddie bailout has also returned a profit to the US Treasury.  Banks recovered quickly and are now earning $200 billion in annual profits. Of course, equity investors, particularly those wiped out by Lehman and many other bankruptcies, or by the global downturn generally, lost trillions as well. The long-term impact, however, was to shift corporate debt to government balance sheets, while leaving households overleveraged.

Thomas Herndon has calculated that 2008-2014 subprime mortgage modifications added $20 billion to homeowner debt (eroding wealth by $20 billion). In other words, all the modification and workout programs of the Bush and Obama administrations did not reduce homeowner debt by a penny. In fact, mortgage lenders added $20 billion (net) fees and interest onto the backs of distressed homeowners. During the same period, $600 billion in foreclosure losses were written off by private mortgage-backed securities investors, implying a similar or greater loss in wealth for foreclosed homeowners. These data include only the private-label side of the housing finance market; adding the debt increase and wealth losses for Fannie and Freddie homeowners could conceivably double the totals.

Nearly 9 million homes were foreclosed from 2007 to 2016. While some were investor-owned, even those often resulted in the eviction of tenant families. Four and one-half million homeowners still remain underwater, i.e. owe more mortgage debt than the value of their home.

 While baby boomers' housing wealth was decimated by foreclosures and increasing mortgage debt, millennials piled on student loan debt, closing the door to home buying and asset building. A recovery built on incomplete deleveraging, and new waves of consumer debt buildup, contains the seeds of the next crisis. While various pundits bemoan the resurgent federal fiscal debt, we would do well to address policies that continue to stoke unsustainable household debt.

Facebook: the new Credit Reporting Agency?

Facebook, it seems, has developed a system of rating users trustworthiness. It's not clear if this is just a system for internal use or if users' trustworthiness scores are for sale to third parties, but if the latter, then would sure seem that Facebook is a Consumer Reporting Agency and subject to CRA provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

FCRA defines a CRA as

any person which, for monetary fees, dues, or on a cooperative nonprofit basis, regularly engages in whole or in part in the practice of assembling or evaluating consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to third parties, and which uses any means or facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of preparing or furnishing consumer reports.

A consumer report is, in turn, defined as:

any written, oral, or other communication of any information by a consumer reporting agency bearing on a consumer’s credit worthiness, credit standing, credit capacity, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living which is used or expected to be used or collected in whole or in part for the purpose of serving as a factor in establishing the consumer’s eligibility for [credit, insurance, employment or government license].

 

Thus, if Facebook is selling information about a consumer's general reputation—trustworthiness—to third parties that might reasonably be expected to use it for credit, insurance, or employment, it's a CRA, and that means it's subject to a host of regulatory requirements as well as civil liability, including statutory damages for willful noncompliance.

 

Facebook is hardly the only tech company that might be a CRA--I've written about this in regard to Google previously.  While Facebook has a bunch of money transmitter licenses and knows it is in the consumer finance space on payments, I suspect it hasn't thought about this from the data perspective.  Indeed, I don't think tech companies think about the possibility that they might be CRAs because we think of CRAs as being firms like Equifax that specialize in being CRAs, but FCRA's definition is broader.  If I collect data on you that I sell to third parties for employment or insurance or credit purposes, I'm a CRA.  Once one plays in consumer data, it's pretty easy to fall into the world of consumer finance regulation. Welcome to a very different Social Network, Mr. Zuckerberg.

 

Update:  Having just read Alan White's post about Thomson Reuters selling data to ICE, it makes me wonder more generally about the applicability of the FCRA to any firm that sells browsing history to parties that use it for credit, insurance, or employment.  I suspect that's a more aggressive of a reading of FCRA than a court would accept, but the statutory language is pretty broad, and perhaps it gets a party to discovery.

Access to Justice, Consumer Bankruptcy Edition

The Great Recession, the CFPB's creation, the rise of debt buying, changes in the debt collection industry, and advances in data collection have encouraged more research recently into issues of access to justice in the context of consumer law and consumer bankruptcy. This spring, the consumer bankruptcy portion of the Emory Bankruptcy Development Journal's annual symposium focused on access to justice and "vindicating the rights of all consumers." Professors Susan Block-Lieb, Kara Bruce, Alexander Sickler, and I spoke at the symposium about how a range of consumer law, finance, and bankruptcy topics converge as issues of access to justice.

We recently posted our accompanying papers (detailed further below) to SSRN. My essay overviews what we know about the barriers people face entering the consumer bankruptcy system, identifies areas for further research, and proposes a couple ideas for improving access to bankruptcy. Susan Block-Lieb’s essay focuses on how cities can assist people dealing with financial troubles. And Kara Bruce’s and Alex Sickler’s co-authored essay reviews the state of FDCPA litigation in chapter 13 cases in light of Midland Funding v. Johnson and explores alternatives to combat the filing of proofs of claim for stale debts.

CFPB Enforcement Paralyzed

Normally we say that a law is as strong as its enforcement. On February 7, however, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raised questions about the enduring strength of the consumer financial laws in its third Request for Information under Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. This time, the topic is CFPB enforcement. It is not hard to guess where this third "RFI" is headed, insofar as only two new enforcement orders have been entered under Mr. Mulvaney to date. In contrast, from the CFPB's inception through November 2017 (when Mr. Mulvaney took office), the Bureau brought a total of 200 public enforcement actions.

Shakespeare Meets ALJs: Much Ado About Nothing

In a recent oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, conservatives urged the Court to outlaw the use of administrative law judges (ALJs) in agency enforcement actions.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is paying notice. On January 31, 2018, the CFPB reprised the ALJ debate in its second Request for Information under Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. This RFI asked:  should the CFPB shift course to litigate all of its enforcement cases in federal court and none before ALJs? Suffice it to say, there is less here than meets the eye.

Call for Papers on College Completion and Student Debt

For those of you writing on student loans, you may be interested in a new call for papers for a conference I am working to organize. On November 30, 2018, the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy, Boston College Law School, and the National Consumer Law Center will hold a daylong symposium on Post-Secondary Education Non-completion and Student Loan Debt on the Law School campus. Our call for papers is out and we are accepting submissions through midnight on Sunday, June 17, 2018. We are especially interested in proposals that examine some aspect of the interaction among student debt, college completion, and/or resulting socioeconomic outcomes. Do consider submitting.

How to Tie CFPB Enforcement Up in Knots

While Acting Director Mick Mulvaney is apparently on a tear to defang the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, some of his actions have flown under the radar. In this and future guest blog posts, I will shine light on one key initiative that largely has gone unnoticed:  namely, the twelve Requests for Information that Mr. Mulvaney launched on January 26. These notices, dubbed "RFIs," seek public comment on scaling back every core function of the CFPB, from enforcement and supervision to rulemaking and consumer complaints. 

Although the RFIs provide the veneer of public participation, in reality they are slanted toward industry. Many are couched in such vague language that consumers and consumer advocates cannot tell which rollbacks are gaining traction behind closed doors. Just last week, Mr. Mulvaney raised new concerns that the RFI process is infected with bias when he personally pressed bankers attending a meeting of the National Association of Realtors to file responses to the RFIs. 

Counting the millions of evictions

The Eviction Lab, a project led by sociologist Matthew Desmond (author of Evicted), have performed the invaluable and impressive task of gathering landlord-tenant eviction records from every county in the nation for the past 16 years. The sobering results, released today (NY Times story) paint a picture of widespread housing insecurity in the wealthiest nation in the world. Each year nearly a million renter households are evicted by court order, and more than twice that number are summoned to court to face eviction. 

© evictionlab.org

The project's web page offers a variety of data reports at the state level, and the promise of many more critical analyses to come. Among the questions that researchers may explore using these data include the rate of housing loss for African-American and Latino families, the impact of the 2008 mortgage foreclosure crisis, and foreclosures generally, on renter households, the efficacy of state and local rental housing subsidy programs, whether gentrification results in displacement, and the location of neighborhoods facing high concentrations of evictions and housing abandonment.

 Security of housing tenure is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary condition for the protection of other political and socio-economic rights. Millions of evictions are the sad and now visible legacy of decades of cuts to public and subsidized housing and basic income support for the poor.

Preempting the states: US Ed to shield debt collectors from consumer protection

As if the power to garnish wages without going to court, seize federal income tax refunds and charge 25% collection fees weren't enough, debt collectors have now persuaded the Education Department to free them from state consumer protection laws when they collect defaulted student loans. Bloomberg News reports that a draft US Ed federal register notice announces the Department's new view that federal law preempts state debt collection laws and state enforcement against student loan collectors. This move is a  reversal of prior US Ed policy promoting student loan borrower's rights and pledging to "work with federal and state law enforcement agencies and regulators" to that end, as reflected in the 2016 Mitchell memo and the Department's collaboration with the CFPB.

Customer service and consumer protection will now take a back seat to crony profiteering by US Ed contractors. This news item has prompted a twitter moment.

The Student Loan Sweatbox

Student loan debt is growing more rapidly than borrower income.  The similarity to the trend in home loan debt leading to the subprime mortgage bubble has been widely noted. Student loan debt in 1990 represented about 30% of a college graduate’s annual earnings; student debt will surpass 100% of a graduate’s annual earnings by 2023.  Total student loan debt also reflects more students going to college, which is a good thing, but the per-borrower debt is on an unsustainable path. Unlike the subprime mortgage bubble, the student loan bubble will not explode and drag down the bond market, banks and other financial institutions. This is because 1) a 100% taxpayer bailout is built into the student loan funding system and 2) defaults do not lead to massive losses. Instead, this generation of students will pay a steadily increasing tax on their incomes, putting a permanent drag on home and car buying and economic growth generally. Student loan defaults do not result in home foreclosures and distressed asset sales. They result in wage garnishments, tax refund intercepts and refinancing via consolidation loans, and mounting federal budget outlays. In many cases, borrowers in default repay the original debt, interest at above-market rates, and 25% collection fees. In other words, defaulting student loan borrowers will remain in a sweatbox for most of their working lives. Proposals to cut back on income-driven repayment options will only aggravate the burden, further shifting responsibility for funding education from taxpayers to a generation of students.

Financial Education Isn't Consumer Protection

The CFPB is out with its Strategic Plan for FY 2018-2022, also known (without any apparent irony) as The Five Year Plan.  Lots to chew on in this doozy, starting with this:

If there is one way to summarize the strategic changes occurring at the Bureau, it is this: we have committed to fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further. Indeed, this should be an ironclad promise for any federal agency; pushing the envelope in pursuit of other objectives ignores the will of the American people, as established in law by their representatives in Congress and the White House. Pushing the envelope also risks trampling upon the liberties of our citizens, or interfering with the sovereignty or autonomy of the states or Indian tribes.

I've written about envelope pushing and Mick-Mulvaney-Think previously, but there's two new things here.  First there's the claim that going beyond the Bureau's statutory responsibilities violates the will of Congress.  (Note the unusual addition of "the White House" to the formulation.)  Narrowly that's uncontroversial, but the way Mulvaney-Think approaches the Bureau's statutory responsibilities, if there isn't a statutory clearly and directly prohibiting something, then there's no prohibition. Standards-based regulation is gone, even if that is exactly what Congress (and the White House when the bill was signed into law) demanded.

Second, there is a curious solicitousness for the rights of states and Indian tribes.  The CFPB has never previously been accused of trampling the rights of states, but the inclusion of states is all the more confusing given the Bureau's newfound commitment to protecting the sovereignty of Indian tribes. The only relevance of Indian tribes to the CFPB is that a few of them partner with "fintechs" in rent-a-tribe schemes to avoid state regulation, particularly state usury laws. It would seem that upholding state sovereignty and rights would require cracking down on rent-a-tribe schemes; the idea that a tribe has immunity for commercial activities extending outside of tribal lands is clearly wrong--were it so all of federal law could be subverted. It looks like someone forgot to remove the "states rights" talking point from the usual GOP talking points deck because someone didn't realize that it conflicts with the new tribal rights talking point.  Oops.  

But let's turn the the actual plan itself, not just the opening rhetoric. I'm only going to focus here on item number 1:  more financial education. This might qualify as Worst. Consumer. Protection. Idea. Ever. 

Letting the Money Changers Back in the Temple

Golden Valley Lending, Inc. is a payday lender that charges 900% interest on consumer loans sold over the internet. Golden Valley relies on the dubious legal dodge of setting up shop on an Indian reservation and electing tribal law in its contracts to evade state usury laws. In April 2017 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed an enforcement action asserting that Golden Valley and three other lenders were engaged in unfair debt collection practices because they violated state usury laws, and also failed to disclose the effective interest rates, violating the federal Truth in Lending law (enacted in 1969). 

 Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s interim appointee to direct the CFPB, has now undone years of enforcement staff work by ordering that the enforcement action be dropped.  The advocacy group Allied Progress offers a summary of Mulvaney’s special interest in protecting payday lenders, in South Carolina and in Congress, and the campaign contributions with which the payday lenders have rewarded him.

 

 

Related articles

Report says Mulvaney has put CFPB probe of Equifax "on ice"

Student loans - the debt collector contracts

Twelve senators have just written to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos questioning why the Education Department continues to award lucrative contracts to debt collection firms, and criticizing the seriously misaligned incentives embedded in those contracts.

While most federal student loan borrowers deal with loan servicing companies like PHEAA, Navient and Nelnet, defaulting borrowers in an unlucky but sizeable minority (roughly 6.5 million) have their loans assigned to debt collectors like Collecto, Inc., Pioneer Credit Recovery, and Immediate Credit Recovery Inc. Borrowers assigned to collection firms immediately face collection fees of 25% added on to their outstanding debt. The collection firms harvest hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, mostly from federal wage garnishments, tax refund intercepts, and new consolidation loans borrowers take out to pay off old defaulted loans. Wage garnishments and tax refund intercepts are simply involuntary forms of income-based repayment, programs that could be administered by servicers without adding massive collection fees to student debt. Similarly, guiding defaulted borrowers to consolidation loans, and putting them into income-driven repayment plans, are services that servicing contractors can and do provide, at much lower cost. In short, the debt collector contracts are bad deals for student loan borrowers and bad deals for taxpayers.

 According to a Washington Post story, one of the collection firms to be awarded a contract this year had financial ties to Secretary DeVos, although she has since divested those ties. In other news, the current administration apparently reinstated two collection firms fired under the prior administration for misinforming borrowers about their rights. More in-depth analysis of the collection agency contract issue by Center for American Progress here.

The Bootstrap Trap

I just had the pleasure of reading Duke Law Professor Sara Sternberg Greene's paper The Bootstrap Trap.  I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the intersection of consumer credit and poverty law.  The paper is chok full of good insights about the problems that arise when low-income households strive for the goal of self-sufficiency, which results in the replacement of a public welfare safety net with what Professor Sternberg Green describes as a private one of credit reporting and scoring systems.  The paper shows off Professor Sternberg Greene's training in sociology with some amazing interviews, particularly about the perceived importance of credit scores in low-income consumers' lives.  

Other respondents referred to their credit reports or scores as “the most important thing in my life, right now, well besides my babies,” as “that darned thing that is destroying my life,” and as “my ticket to good neighborhoods and good schools for my kids.” Many respondents believed that a “good” credit score was the key to financial stability.

One respondent, Maria, told a story about a friend who was able to improve his score. She said, “He figured out some way to get it up. Way up. I wish I knew what he did there, because I would do it. Because after that, everything was easy as pie for him. Got himself a better job, a better place to live, everything better.” Maria went to great lengths to try to improve her score so that she, too, could live a life where everything was “easy as pie.”

Credit scores have become a metric of self worth and the perceived key to success.  

Mick-Mulvaney-Think

A couple of weeks ago there appeared a remarkable memo written by Mick Mulvaney (who claims to be the Acting Director of the CFPB) to the CFPB staff. The Financial Institutions practice group at Davis Polk, one of the top financial institution practices nationwide, seems to have elevated the ideas expressed in the memo into what one might call “Mick-Mulvaney-Think.”

The basic idea behind Mick-Mulvaney-Think is “a deep commitment to the rule of law as a philosophical concept and as an important brake on agency discretion in the administrative state.” In other words, agencies should not undertake any discretionary actions, but only enforce clear violations of express statutory prohibitions. There are two problems with this idea.

House Financial Services Fintech Hearing

This Tuesday I'm going to be testifying about "fintechs" before the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.  My written testimony on this impossibly broad topic is here.  It contains lots of good stuff on the so-called Madden Fix bill, "true lender" legislation, data portability, federal money transmitter licensing, small business data collection, and the need for a general federal ability-to-repay rule.    

Whitford on Law School Financial Aid

Although technically emeritus and making history as a named plaintiff in a gerrymandering case before the U.S. Supreme Court, our commercial law colleague Professor Bill Whitford remains worried about law schools in a way in a way that connects with an issue well known to Credit Slips: student loans. Whitford's latest analysis of law school financial aid is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education but is available to us now on SSRN.

More on Madden

I have a more refined piece on the problems with the Madden fix bills in the American Banker.  See here for my previous thoughts. 

Guess Who's Supporting Predatory Lending?

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. 

Yup, you heard me right: Democrats. Ten years after the financial crisis, it seems like we’ve gone back to the mistakes of the Clinton years when centrist Democrats rode the financial deregulatory bandwagon. What I’m talking about is the McHenry-Meeks Madden “fix” bill, the “Protecting Consumers’ Access to Credit Act of 2017”. The bill effectively preempts state usury laws for non-bank finance companies like payday lenders in the name of ensuring access to credit, even if on extremely onerous terms.

Right now there's only one Democratic co-sponsor, but others seem to be preparing to join in. They shouldn't, and if they do sign onto this bill, it should only be in exchange for some solid consumer protections to substitute for the preempted state usury laws. This bill should be seen as a test of whether New Democrats "get it" about financial regulation. I'm hoping that they do. If not, perhaps its time to find some new Democrats.   

CFPB Politics Update

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.

Senate Banking Committee Testimony

I'm testifying before the Senate Banking Committee this week about "Fostering Economic Growth: The Role of Financial Institutions in Local Communities".  It's the undercard for the Comey hearing.  The big point I'm making are that the problem is not one of economic growth, but economic distribution.  While the US economy has grown by 9% in real terms since Dodd-Frank, real median income has fallen by 0.6%.  That's pretty grim.  The gains have all gone to the top 10% and particularly the top 1%.  

None of the various deregulatory proposals put forward by the financial services industry have anything to do with growth, and they have even less to do with ensuring equitable growth. For example, changing the CFPB from a single director to a commission or switching examination and enforcement authority from CFPB to prudential regulators shouldn't have anything to do with growth.  It's a reshuffling of regulatory deck chairs.  

The banking industry has been doing incredibly well since Dodd-Frank, outperforming the S&P 500, for example.  You'd never know it, however, from their trade association talking points. It really takes a certain kind of chutzpah to demand the repeal of consumer protection laws and laws designed to prevent the privatization of gains and socialization of losses when you are already doing so much better than the typical American family.

My complete written testimony can be found here. 

Foreclosure Crisis Update

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. In the ten years from 2007 through the end of 2016, about 6.7 million foreclosure sales were completed, and another 2 million or so short sales and deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure brought the total home losses to about 8.7 million, according to HOPE NOW.

Subprime mortgages accounted for 2 million of those foreclosure sales and perhaps another 500,000 of the stressed sales. The 2.5 million total home losses roughly matches predictions made at the onset of the crisis, and exceed by a considerable number the total number of subprime mortgages made to first-time home buyers from 2000 to 2007. In other words, subprime mortgages subtracted more than they added to home ownership.

The pre-crisis loans are by no means all resolved. About one million active mortgage loans were modified under the HAMP program, meaning that interest rates and payments were reduced for up to five years. Many of those mortgages will face steep rate and payment increases in the coming years, and many are also in negative equity, making sale or refinancing difficult or impossible. A total of around 8 million mortgages were modified under various programs at some point, although a significant portion of those later ended up among the 8 million home losses. The good news is that the number of homes whose mortgage exceeds the market value (underwater or negative equity) has declined from 30% of homes to fewer than 8%. The bad news is that just under 8% of homes are still underwater, a precarious situation that remains historically unprecedented.

These stats and many others can be found in an excellent new monthly housing finance data compendium from the Urban Institute.

Consumer Rights to Know Regarding Adverse Action

Four core federal consumer financial laws—the Truth in Lending Act (and Reg Z), the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (and Reg E), the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (and Reg X) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (and Reg B)—all have a mechanism whereby a consumer has a right to know why a financial institution denied a claim of an error or a credit application.  I've often puzzled over how much work these provisions really do--TILA and EFTA and RESPA are attempts at informal dispute resolution, while ECOA is a way of policing discriminatory lending (if the creditor cannot come up with a plausible reason for the denial, there's a problem).  But at the end of the day, there's no guaranty of any relief for consumers from these provisions.  

Today, however, I started to understand these provisions better because of the mess that's going on with student loan forgiveness.  The federal government has a major loan forgiveness program for those who work 10 years in public service or at non-profits. Apparently some applications for loan forgiveness eligibility have been denied without any explanation. That really puts borrowers at a loss--they can't tell if the problem is simply a missing form or incorrect paperwork or that they truly aren't eligible or that's the government's loan servicing agent has made a mistake.  That's a pretty awful situation because without more information, a consumer cannot figure out if there's a simple, low-cost way to resolve the issue, if the only solution is through litigation, or if the consumer is truly in the wrong.  

On a related note, the potential revocability of the loan forgiveness eligibility letters strikes me as teeing up the mother of all promissory estoppel cases. 

Recommended Reading: Empire of the Fund

It's that time of year again! Time to revisit and perhaps rebalance the investments in your retirement portfolio. While it is a sad fact that many people lack significant retirement savings, it is nonetheless useful for those interested in consumer finance (and investment companies, pensions, etc.) to think about how retirement savings plans work and to be able to offer some advice, for example, to debtors emerging from bankruptcy with their clean slate. William Birdthistle, of Chicago-Kent law school, has recently released Empire of the Fund, a magnificent new work on the most common vehicle that carries individuals' retirement savings in the US: mutual funds.

I have heard that Birdthistle, who teaches across town from me, is legendary in the classroom. Having read his new book, I'm not at all surprised. While his fairly esoteric subject matter made me hesitate to nominate his book in response to Katie's post, Birdthistle has really pulled one off here by managing to make a book about the structure and pitfalls of mutual funds and retirement savings ... extremely entertaining! It is masterfully written, with both erudite references to relevant comments by literary and historical figures, along with laugh-out-loud allusions to modern culture ("OMG! Friends, right! Mutual funds are lame!"). This book is an absolutely brilliant example of how to make a work on an otherwise dry financial subject not only accessible to the general public, but a real pleasure to read. It is no wonder the New York Times calls this "a lively new book."

CFPB Tales Told Out of School (Updated)

Former CFPB enforcement attorney Ronald Rubin has a lengthy attack on the CFPB in the National Review. It's got lots of sultry details, but there's nothing new and verifiable in the piece.  Instead, it's all tales told out of school, unverifiable personal anecdotes by Rubin, who seems to have an particular axe to grind with certain other CFPB staffers, and an ideological one too. Incredibly, Rubin, a former Managing Director for legal and compliance at Bear Stearns, holds up the oft-feckless SEC as a model of good enforcement practice, and criticizes the CFPB for any departures from that practice. 

The point of the piece seems to be that the CFPB is an agency gone rogue and that this wouldn't have happened if the CFPB had just been structured as a bi-partisan commission. That's hogwash. Assume that everything Rubin claims is true and correct. Even if so, every single problem Rubin identifies in the piece could just as easily have occurred at a bi-partisan commission. Partisan hiring? Of course that can happen because the staff hiring decisions (other than those of the personal staffs of the commissioners) are done by the commission chair and people the chair has selected. Secrecy and stonewalling Congress? We see allegations about that regarding agencies all the time (and that from agencies not facing partisan witch-hunts). Unhappy employees? Check. Pressure on regulated firms to settle enforcement actions? Check. Claims of discrimination by employees? Check. These are problems that can occur at any agency, irrespective of its structure or funding. 

Fake News, Special Carrie Sheffield CFPB Edition

The "fake news" phenomenon has gotten a lot of attention of late, but there's also the problem of its kissing cousins, faux academic research and opinions piece that springboards off of fake news and faux research.  A comically bad example of the latter category is the hatchet job Carrie Sheffield tries to pull on the CFPB in a piece on Salon.com.  In a nutshell, Sheffield (1) accuses the CFPB of being "rampant with internal racism and anti-woman bias," (3) claims that the CFPB has resulted in an increase in bank fees, and then (3) makes a big deal out of CFPB employees' political donations tilting toward Democrats.  The first and second points are simply false and not supported by the evidence Sheffield cites.  The third point is just irrelevant, but shows Sheffield to be nothing more than a partisan hack.  Sheffield's piece really doesn't merit a response intellectually, but given the current political climate, it's necessary to respond to any calumny, no matter how ridiculous.  So a point by point follows, after which I share a few thoughts on the political price tag that will come with trying to get rid of the CFPB.

The CFPB and Behavioral Economics

This post is an extended aside from my previous post about David Evans' argument about the CFPB's mindset and institutional incentives.  The point isn't critical to Evans' argument, but I'm writing because it really irks me because it shows such a lack of understanding about the CFPB.  Specifically, Evans suggests that the CFPB's supposed emphasis on preventing consumer harms rather than maximizing consumer welfare stems from the CFPB’s “intellectual foundation in behavioral economics.” This just wrong.  The CFPB really doesn’t have a behavioral economics DNA. (Heck, behavioral economics hasn't made much of a mark on government in general).  

The CFPB and Consumer Welfare

David Evans has an interesting article on PYMNTS that argues that "The fundamental problem with the CFPB ... isn’t who’s on top. It is that the CFPB does not have an institutional desire, or incentives, to make sure that the financial services industry supplies consumers with products that consumers need, including loans.” It’s refreshing to hear a CFPB critic argue that the issue isn’t really with the CFPB’s structure, but with its worldview. But Evans is still wrong.  

Civil Rights and Economic Justice in a New Era

Sharing news of this post-election civil rights conference on December 2, 2016 that, notably for Credit Slips, features pathbreaking research by Professors Mechele Dickerson and Bob Lawless (in collaboration with Dov Cohen and the late Jean Braucher) on the intersection of race with debt and bankruptcy and an exploration of how this research informs policymaking and advocacy going forward. Time permitting, I will address a different intersection between race and debt: collecting judgments arising from police misconduct when cities file for bankruptcy. Thanks to Professor Ted Shaw and the Center for Civil Rights for recognizing the role debtor-creditor research can play in the quest for equality. 

Register using this link.

 

Does Behavioral Economics Matter?

The New Republic (yes it still exists) has a piece about whether behavioral economics will have as much influence in a Clinton administration as it did in the Obama administration. The unspoken assumption of the piece is that behavioral economics actually had a big influence in the Obama administration. Here's the thing:  as far as I can tell, behavioral economics has been basically irrelevant in the Obama administration.

Yes, Cass Sunstein was the head of OIRA for part of the Obama administration. But when Sunstein went on a post-administration victory lap giving talks at a bunch of law schools (including at Georgetown), it was notable how few concrete examples he could give of the influence of behavioral economics on policy. There is, to be sure, an executive order suggesting that agencies subject to the order consider behavioral implications in their rulemakings, but the only concrete example Sunstein had was the transformation of the food pyramid into a food plate. (If you missed that change, well, you aren't the only one.) It's not entirely clear to me what great behavioral implication is from going from a pyramid to a plate, much less how much influence it had on how anyone eats.  There are, apparently, a bunch of other behaviorally-influenced moves according to a recent White House report.  But man, they are really small bore improvements on the margins (e.g., calling unemployed workers "job seekers" rather than "claimants"). If this is the highwater mark for behavioral economics, then it has truly fizzled as a policy move.  

Is It Time for the CFPB to Regulate Retail Bank Employee Compensation?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that incentive-based compensation like the type featured in Wells Fargo's current and previous consent orders has the potential to encourage fraud and steering of consumers into inappropriate products in order to make sales numbers. Here's the thing:  there's little regulation of retail banking employee compensation. Instead, banks are relied upon to self-regulate, to have the good sense not to have unduly coercive incentive compensation and to have internal controls to catch the problems incentive compensation can create. But when a leading bank like Wells Fargo repeatedly fails to have good sense and to have sufficient internal controls, it suggests that it might be time for more directed regulation that will create clearer lines that facilitate compliance.  

The CFPB already regulates the compensation of mortgage originators (loan officers and brokers), limiting compensation based on loan terms to 10% of total compensation. But this regulation applies only to mortgage loans. There's no regulation of retail banking employee compensation generally.  And there are some big wholes in the CFPB mortgage loan officer compensation regulation. In particular, the CFPB's regulation does not cover compensation based on the number of loans made or the size of the loans, only on the terms of the loans. That leaves the door open for banks to set up compensation schemes that pressure employees to engage in fraud to meet quotas and get bonuses. 

So what can be done going forward?  

Not Wells Fargo's First Rodeo...

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 trouble in 2011, falsifying borrower income and employment information in order to sell debt consolidation, cash-out refinance mortgage loans at sub-prime rates (often to prime borrowers).  Wells entered into an $85 million consent order with the Federal Reserve Board in July 2011 over these practices. (See summary here.) The consent order noted that it was Wells incentive-based compensation and minimum sales quotas that drove the employee fraud:  

B. Under Financial's sales performance standards and incentive compensation programs, Financial sales personnel, called "team members," were expected to sell (a) a minimum dollar amount of loans to avoid performance improvement plans that could result in loss of their positions with Financial, and (b) a minimum dollar amount of loans to receive incentive compensation payments above their base salary.

This rather expensive consent order should have been a giant red flag for Wells Fargo's compliance department, for Wells Fargo's board of directors, and for John Stumpf, Wells Fargo's Chairman/CEO.  It should have caused Wells Fargo to reexamine its loan officer compensation structures throughout the bank.  One assumes that the consent order did not come out of the blue in July 2011, but was likely the result of months if not years of investigation and negotiation.  That suggests that Wells should have been aware of problems with its compensation system substantially before it began firing employees in 2011 over the unauthorized account openings.  As ugly as things already look for Wells, we might learn that things were in fact worse. 

John Oliver and Consumer Law YouTube Videos

I'm trying something new this year. My consumer bankruptcy policy seminar students will read many great articles by many wonderful academics on this blog, as well as others, but this year, their "reading" will also include a great deal of YouTube.

90% of the videos are John Oliver segments from his excellent show on HBO, Last Week Tonight. They cover particular "products" (student loans, credit reports, debt buying, payday loans, auto loans, retirement plans and financial advisors) and middle class issues (minimum wage, wage gap, wealth gap, paid family leave).

I thought Credit Slips readers might enjoy seeing them all in one place. Here they are in no particular order. Let me know if I've missed any!

Porter's Modern Consumer Law

Credit Slips blogger Katie Porter has produced a new textbook in consumer law that anyone teaching the subject should consider adopting. Indeed, law professors not teaching consumer law should to take a look at it and consider whether they should add the class to their teaching portfolio. A 2013 poll on Brian Leiter's Law School Reports named consumer law as the number one "area of law which deserves more attention in the legal academy." Next academic year I will be picking up a new course, and the emergence of Porter's new text made the decision easy for me as to which course it will be.

In the preface, Porter makes explicit her three-pronged approach to the topic of consumer law:

1. The book situates consumer law within the business-law curriculum. "Consumer law is big business," she notes. Understanding the legal issues requires understanding the "deal," the information flow, and the market in which the transaction occurs. Porter expressly recognizes, "the world of consumer practice offers opportunities for lawyers to represent consumers (as government lawyers, policy advocates, and plaintiffs’ attorneys) and to represent businesses (as in-house counsel, defense attorneys, and
   lobbyists)."
2. The book provides a strong theoretical frame by situating consumer law at the intersection of tort and contract. The book does not present consumer law as a hodgepodge of cases and statutes loosely organized around the term "consumer." Rather it recognizes that a lot of what travels under the law of "consumer law" responds to the gaps that traditional contract and torts doctrines have when it comes to the issues that consumer transactions create.
3. The book explores where the social-science literature has learning for consumer law. Porter looks to see what psychology, sociology, marketing, and economics can add to our understanding of the legal issues. By doing so, the book explores the difference between law on the ground and law in the books. 

The book uses a problem-based method of instruction that will be familiar to users of Porter's co-authored bankruptcy textbook or my co-authored secured transactions textbook. The problems range from straight-forward statute readers to teach doctrine to tough client counseling problems that focus on real-world lawyering skills.

More information, including a table of contents and a sample chapter, can be found at Aspen Publishers.

The Bad CHOICE Act

I'm testifying before House Financial Services tomorrow regarding the "CHOICE Act," the Republican Dodd-Frank alternative.  My testimony is here.  It's lengthy, but it doesn't even cover everything in the CHOICE Act--there are just too many bad provisions, starting with the idea of letting megabanks out of Dodd-Frank's heightened prudential standards in exchange for more capital, then moving on to a total gutting of consumer financial protection, and ending with a very poorly conceived good bank/bad bank resolution system executed through a new bankruptcy subchapter.  The only good thing about the Bad CHOICE Act is that it has little chance of becoming law any time soon. 

Further Debate About Debt Collection Reform and Credit Availability

The Center for Responsible Lending has produced a nice, new empirical paper reflecting on and refuting the notion that certain debt collection reforms restrict the flow of consumer credit. The analysis is careful and impressive, and the natural laboratory experiment they found is fun and intriguing. In a nutshell, North Carolina in 2009 and Maryland in 2012 imposed new restrictions on debt buyers suing consumer debtors on purchased accounts (both states now require actual documentation of the debts and their ownership to support such suits). On cue, in the period leading to these reforms, the credit lobby predicted gloom and doom in terms of restricted access to credit, especially to sub-prime borrowers, if such liberal nanny-laws were adopted. Several years later, the CRL decided to look back and test this. Comparing the change in the number and dollar volume of new credit lines in North Carolina and Maryland in the two years before and after each of the reforms (coincidentally, periods of general economic contraction and recovery, respectively), and comparing these differences with comparable data for selected peer states and the nation as a whole, did the reforms seem to have a noticeable effect of reduced access to credit in these states?  The simple answer, of course, is no (i.e., less contraction in North Carolina than elsewhere during a recession, and more expansion in Maryland than elsewhere during recovery). The more nuanced answer means the debate will rage on.

Learn about Teaching Consumer Law in Beautiful Santa Fe May 20-21, 2016

On May 20-21st, the Center for Consumer Law at the University of Houston Law Center will present “TEACHING CONSUMER LAW IN OUR POPULAR CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA.” Sponsored by the University of New Mexico School of Law, this is the only Conference in the world dedicated to the teaching of consumer law.

This year’s Conference features 25 speakers, including the respected U.S. consumer law scholars, as well as presenters from nine other countries. Topics include discussions of new and innovative teaching techniques, substantive consumer law updates, a detailed discussion of the CFPB, empirical studies on consumer law issues, and numerous presentations of consumer law in other countries, such as Iraq, Japan, Nigeria, the EU, Nigeria, Denmark, and China.
 
The Conference will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the most unique cities in American. A Conference brochure and registration form will be available shortly. In the meantime, please save the date. To view the tentative schedule and register , click here.
 
Richard Alderman and I look forward to seeing you in Santa Fe.

 

 

 

 

 

The Financial Lives of Undocumented Immigrants

We know little about the financial lives and credit constraints of undocumented immigrants, partly because they are such a difficult to reach population. But Slips contributor Nathalie Martin gained access to this population in Albuquerque, New Mexico, interviewed 50 immigrants, and recently published a paper that provides an important glimpse into how this population handles money and finances. As the paper's title -- Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: What We Can Learn from the Banking and Credit Habits of Undocumented Immigrants -- suggests, this population is leery of taking out credit, despite having so little income and savings that unexpected expenses quickly can become financial crises.

One of the most interesting, but expected findings is this population's extremely low level of savings. When asked if they could handle an unexpected expense of $100, three-quarters of respondents (37 of the 50) said they could not. But the majority of interviewees also expressed serious concerns with taking out credit, including via credit cards and the almost inevitable title loans (and payday loans, but most payday loans require a bank account, which a majority of respondents did not have). Indeed, they stated that they would rather ask family and friends for help, including help in trying to find work, which adds nuance to what we know about low-income individuals' feelings about relying on family and friends to deal with unexpected expenses (for instance, see Laura Tach and Sara Greene, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul). Martin's paper also contains data about how undocumented immigrants think about what ultimately often are legal problems and using (or not using) the legal system. Taken together, the paper provides a needed first glimpse into the financial lives of a subset of people who are in the country.

The Promise and Limits of Postal Banking

It’s easy for Progressives to get excited about the idea of postal banking: a public option for banking! What’s not to love?

I’m glad to see the idea of public options in financial services getting some play of late; it’s something I’ve championed for a while in payments and housing finance. But I think it’s necessary to recognize some of the limits to postal banking. In particular, it's not at all clear to me why we would want to involve the Post Office in the public provision of financial services. What the Post Office offers is a way to recreate a brick-and-mortar branch bank network. This really doesn't make a lot of sense for 21st century banking. Additionally, postal banking is often pitched as an alternative to payday and title lenders. Before we go running down that path, we should think about what it means to have the government in the payday lending business.

Credit Slips Unofficial Contest: Win Everything (all the glory that is)

Credit Slips has great readers, and I'd love to encourage more of our readership to comment. So I've created this contest, of which I will be the sole judge, except that I'll probably actually let John Pottow decide to keep it quirky.

Here's the challenge. What is an important legal protection for consumers that nobody has ever heard of? I don't mean literally that nobody has heard of but rather a consumer legal right that is poorly understood or underutilized. Even your fellow savants (aka nerds) who read Credit Slips will be blown away to learn of this law. Federal or state laws are fair game, and while the law does not have to be strictly a borrower protection, it should have some connection to household financial security or credit.

I'd love to give you an example but I don't want to take the wind out of everyone's sails by revealing my entry.

The prize is only glory and bragging rights (and maybe a mention in my new Consumer Law textbook) but at least it's not an all-expense paid trip to the next Presidential debate.

The Myth of the Disappearing Free Checking Account

A regular trope sounded by opponents of consumer financial regulations is that the regulations have resulted in the disappearance of free checking. Whether it's the Durbin Interchange Amendment, the CFPB, or the Dodd-Frank Act in general, all are variously blamed for the supposed demise of free checking.  As it turns out, free checking is a little like Mark Twain--reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.  Most Americans with bank accounts report paying nothing for their services.  The prevalance of such respondents has actually increased since 2010, from 53% to 61% of respondents. 

Pro Publica: Extraordinary Struggles of African American Debtors

I understand what it's like to live in a low-income family. I can only begin to try to understand the extraordinary struggles facing low-income families who also happen to be black. Pro Publica has just released a story and accompanying study that helps a bit to bridge this empathy gap.

Along the way, the story raises a frustrating point about our legal system that impacts all lower-income communities, but black folks in particular: Most legal protections against the kinds of rapacious collections activities described in the Pro Publica story require the debtor to affirmatively invoke the protections. For example, the story notes a collector explaining "if Byrd had filed a claim in court stating that the funds were exempt, the garnishment would have been terminated." Does the tragic irony escape this commentator? Byrd doesn't have enough money to pay the $29 sewer bill--do we really expect her to hire and pay for a lawyer to "file a claim in court stating that the funds were exempt"?! Similarly, the story describes default judgments being entered on time-barred debts because the debtors failed to invoke the statute of limitations--why in the world would a rational system allow time-barred debt to be revived against an impecunious debtor for failure to pay for counsel to raise this defense?! It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. The clever and unscrupulous inevitably prevail in a system where "The law doesn’t require anyone to tell debtors like Winfield of the [head-of-household 10% garnishment] exemption, and the burden is on them to claim it."

The story also cites and links to a study (and comments from study contributor and Slipster, Bob Lawless) on racial disparities in Chapter 13 practice. I've witnessed the emotional fervor that this study can whip up in a crowd of bankruptcy attorneys ... but the Pro Publica story ought to prompt us to return to the provocative question of whether, intentionally or not, directly or indirectly, our debt collection and debt relief systems are disparately impacting our black neighbors. Fixing problems that fall more heavily on these debtors would improve the system for everyone.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Prime, Subprime, Deep Subprime, Suprime-Like . . . and hold it, my fav "Aspiring Prime"

What's in a name? A lot of heartache, potentially, as Johnny Cash explained in A Boy Named Sue.

The consumer finance industry is awash in labels for lending. Despite the lack of data, and clear analysis, that left certain people (apparently nearly all of Wall Street) surprised about the housing crisis, the lending industry is still defining success for itself. Kevin Wack at American Banker examines the "slippery" definition of subprime, giving examples of Equifax recalibrating the "subprime" and "deep subprime" labels to different places on the credit score range. The result: instantly, the percentage of subprime auto loan originations falls from 36% to 28%.

Labels themselves do not predict default risk (we hope the actual underwriting, including credit score, does that work). But labels do matter. Consistent use of terms such as "prime" and "subprime" help government and researchers study trends and make consistent, reliable determinations about markets. They make sure that various regulators are looking at similar loans, and they help the public evaluate their credit standing.

Maybe this is a project for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which devoted one-page to consumer protection in its 100-page 2015 report. In what I take as a sign that FSOC should tackle this issue, there is even a heading on "Data Gaps."

Consumer Financial Protection Clinic Position

Here's an opportunity to supervise a consumer financial protection clinic that has done some great work - information on the position and how to apply here. 

Faster Payments: Is There a Business Case?

The Federal Reserve System has embarked on a project of exploring the possibility of faster retail payments in the United States.  A similar move has occurred with the UK Payments Council.  At the same time, the Electronic Payments Network is rolling out a faster version of ACH.

Here's what puzzles me:  what on earth is the business case for faster retail payments in the United States?  The U.S. payment system works incredibly well. Yes, it has flaws: the interchange system is unfair and security is atrocious. But those aren't really speed issues.  Real-time authentication is a security issue, but that's separate from speed of payment clearance and settlement.  

Now, it's true that the US lags behind other countries in terms of mobile payment technology.  We don't have anything like Kenya's m-Pesa mobile payment system. But there's a reason for that:  we don't need m-Pesa in the US because we already have a functioning retail banking system, and our banks are better safety-and-soundness risks than our telecom operators.  (Kenya's government owns a large share of m-Pesa, making it quasi-guarantied, I guess.)  

So readers, tell me, what am I missing?  Is there a business case, or is this just about chasing shiny bells and whistles and wanting to have the latest technology just because?  My sense is that we're seeing an "iPhone effect" of wanting the best and newest, even though the current system is just fine. 

Madden v. Marine Midland Funding

In a recent case called Madden v. Marine Midland Funding, the Second Circuit ruled that a loan owned by a debt collector violated New York's usury statute.  The loan had been originally made by a national bank and was subsequently sold to the debt collector when it was in default.  There's no question that the state usury law was preempted when the loan was held by the national bank.  The Supreme Court's (awful) Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp. decision from 1978 makes that very clear.  (The Court suddenly discovered in 1978 that over a century of legal understanding of the 1864 National Bank Act was somehow wrong and that banks had been leaving lots of money on the table.)  

The debt collector argued that because the loan had been made by a national bank, it carried preemption of state usury laws with it as a permanent, indelible feature.  "Applesauce!" proclaimed the Second Circuit:  National Bank Act preemption of state usury laws extends no further than National Bank Act regulation.  Preemption is part of a package with regulation, but once the loan passes beyond the hands of a National Bank, it loses its preemption protection and becomes subject to state usury laws.  (Some of you might recognize that this is an argument I made several years ago. Plaintiff's counsel sent me a very nice email to this effect.  You owe me a citation, 2d Circuit!).  

Is There a Student Loan Debt Crisis?

I've been a skeptic for some time about claims that we have a student loan "crisis" in the United States. For individuals mired with student loan debt, it is very much a crisis, of course.  But my reluctance to term growing levels of student loan debt a crisis reflects the fact that student loan debt is highly concentrated within the population and is generally structured in a way that does not create sharp liquidity crises:  long (and often deferrable) maturities, no sharp repayment shocks, and often offers established repayment and forgiveness programs. (This is more true of government loans than private loans.) And, while student loan debt is growing rapidly, it is still only about a 9th of the size of the mortgage market. All of this has kept the student loan kettle from boiling over.  

Yet at the same time it is precisely because of the concentration of student loans in the younger population that it is concerning.  Large debt loads at the beginning of one's adult life are likely to have very different effects on than debt spread out over a life time.  Moreover, student loans are not incurred based on current income, but on assumptions of future income (if that), so student loan debt burdens are more likely to be poorly calibrated to borrower's actual earning capacity. Additionally, because student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy (except in extreme circumstances), unlike other types of debt, it likely to stick around.  And, unlike various types of secured debt, there is no "put" option. A homeowner who runs into trouble with a mortgage or a cash-strapped auto loan borrower can always sell the house or car (or let them be repossessed) to pay off part or all of the debt. That's not possible with unsecured debt.  

The real concern with student loans is not an acute liquidity crisis, like a mortgage payment resets or a massive surge in defaults, as with underwater homeowners.  Instead, the systemic danger from student loans is a debt overhang problem in which consumers' consumption habits are altered by the constant drag of debt service. That's not a "crisis" yet, but it's a problem that needs to be addressed before it becomes one. 

Rent-to-Own Hair Weaves

Apparently there is a business of rent-to-own hair weaves.  As a bald man, this is of particular interest. Below is a description of some of the program:

Please use our purchase program. The owners of this website or The Weave Loan Store/Weave Loans is not a lender.  Approval will vary based on credit determination and state law. This transaction is a rental-purchase agreement (or in NV, a lease agreement with an option to purchase; in IA, ND, NE, and SC, a consumer rental-purchase agreement; in CT and NH, a rent-to-own agreement; in AK, DC, DE, HI, ID, KS, OR, SD, VA, and WA, a lease-purchase agreement; in MA and RI, a lease; or in VT a consumer lease agreement). The Weave Loan Store Purchase Program is not available in MN or WI. For Consumers in Massachusetts and Rhode island, at any time after the initial payment, [sic]. You will not own the merchandise in The Weave Loan purchase program until the total amount necessary to acquire ownership is paid in full or until you purchase your early purchase option of our program. Ownership is optional. For consumers In VT, minimum 18-week  billing period applies. Product availability and pricing may vary by store, the internet sales, and seasons.. The Weave Loan Store Hair Extension Sales is not responsible for merchandise damaged by the customer. Free or reduced rent offers will not reduce total rent or purchase-option amounts. Our program contains credit and no credit check and no credit needed. The Customer must agree to not abide by the merchandise care instructions it is and shall hold The Weave Loan Store harmless of any damage caused by the customer. Program validation and Agreement requires verification of residence, income and personal references. You can release merchandise. The Weave Loan Store and Weave Loans, Wig Loans etc. are trademarks of Couture Enterprises INC. and the use of the names in anyway without written permission of the owners of Couture Enterprises is strictly prohibited and if used without permission will be subject to penalty of the law. By using the services and participating in our program are agreeing to the Terms & Conditions of this website and The Weave Loan Store. By using the services on this website you are agreeing to the Terms and Conditions listed.

There are clearly some editing problems with this langauge, such as "The Customer must agree to not abide by the merchandise care instructions".  

There's also the irony of a place called "The Weave Loan Store" claiming that it's not a lender. 

I particularly like the highlighted portion noting that "You can release merchandise."  Perhaps that's meant for hair weave businesses to finance their weaves and then sublet them to customers, but if not, how'd you like to rent my weave? 

But here's the real question:  what happens if you default on the rental?  Can The Weave Loan Store replevy the hair?  I don't think there's a self-help remedy here that doesn't involve breaching the peace.  And how does The Weave Loan Store prove that the hair being replevied is its hair?  It's not as if weaves come with serial numbers (as far as I know).