Amicus Brief on Valid-When-Made

I have filed an amicus brief regarding "valid-when-made" in Rent-Rite Super Kegs West, Ltd. v. World Business Lenders, LLC. The brief shows pretty conclusively that there was no such doctrine discernible in the law when either the National Bank Act of 1864 or the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 were enacted, and that subsequent cases consistent with the doctrine are based on a misreading of older law. 

The Sky Is Falling: Securitization, Chicken Little Edition

It's been quite a week for "valid-when-made (up)".  Not only did FDIC and OCC race to court to defend the doctrine in the context of a 120.86% small business loan, but there's a Bloomberg story out about a set of class action usury law suits (here and here) against the credit card securitization trusts used by Capital One and Chase. The story suggests that these suits threaten the $563 billion asset-securitization market and also the $11 trillion mortgage securitization market. That claim is so readily disprovable, it's laughable. 

Here's the background. New York has a 16% usury cap under Gen. Oblig. Law 5-501. The National Bank Act § 85 provides that that cap does not apply to national banks that are based in other states (such as Delaware), but the National Bank Act only covers banks. The securitization trusts are not banks, but are common law or Delaware statutory trusts. The class action suits argue that under the 2d Circuit's Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC precedent, it is clear that New York usury law applies to the trusts; they cannot shelter in National Bank Act preemption because they are not national banks. 

Obviously, the banks see it the other way, and have invoked valid-when-made as part of their defense. They're wrong, but what irks me is that financial services industry lawyers and trade associations are claiming that if these class action suits succeed the sky will fall for securitization and that the Bloomberg article didn't really question this claim: Bloomberg's headline is that the entire $563 billion ABS securitization market is at risk, and bank attorneys suggest in the article that the $11 trillion mortgage securitization market is at risk too. 

Let's be clear. This is utter nonsense on a Chicken Little scale. These class action law suits affect only part of the $123 billion credit card securitization and the very small $30 billion unsecured consumer loan securitization markets. Even then they do not threaten to kill off these markets, but merely limit what loans can be securitized to those that comply with the applicable state's usury laws. They do not affect mortgage securitization at all and are unlikely to have much, if any impact on auto loan securitization or student loan securitization. To suggest, as the Bloomberg article does, that these class action suits affect the securitization markets for cellphone receivables or time shares (where is there a usury claim even possible in those markets?) is embarrassingly ridiculous. The sky isn't falling, Turkey Lurkey. Full stop. 

FDIC and OCC Race to Court to Defend 120.86% Interest Rate Small Business Loan

FDIC and OCC filed an amicus brief in the district court in an obscure small business bankruptcy case to which a bank was not even a party in order to defend the validity of a 120.86% loan that was made by a tiny community bank in Wisconsin (with its own history of consumer protection compliance issues) and then transferred to a predatory small business lending outfit. Stay classy federal bank regulators. 

[Update: based on additional information--not in the record unfortunately--this is clearly a rent-a-bank case, with the loan purchaser having been involved in the loan from the get-go.]

FDIC and OCC filed the amicus to defend the valid-when-made doctrine that the bankruptcy court invoked in its opinion. FDIC and OCC claim it is "well-settled" law, but if so, what the heck are they doing filing an amicus in the district court in this case? They doth protest too much.

What really seems to be going on is that FDIC/OCC would like to get a circuit split with the Second Circuit's opinion in Madden v. Midland Funding in order to get the Supreme Court to grant certiorari on the valid-when-made question in order to reverse Madden. The lesson that should be learned here is that while Congress seriously chastised OCC for its aggressive preemption campaign by amending the preemption standards in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, that hasn't been enough, and going forward additional legislative changes to the National Bank Act are necessary. Indeed, the FDIC and OCC action underscores why FDIC and OCC cannot be trusted with a consumer protection mission, even for small banks (currently they enforce consumer protection laws for banks with less than $10 billion in assets). The FDIC and OCC are simply too conflicted with their interest in protecting bank solvency and profitability, even if it comes at the expense of consumer protection. Moving rulemaking and large bank enforcement to CFPB was an important improvement, but what we are seeing here is evidence that it simply wasn't enough. 

More on the background to the story from Ballard Spahr. Needless to say, I completely disagree with the historical claim by FDIC/OCC (and echoed by Ballard Spahr) about "valid-when-made". Valid-when-made-up is more like it.  

Small Borrowers Continue to Struggle Without Relief

Several recent stories remind us that many, many ordinary people around the world continue to struggle with crushing debt with no access to legal relief, and when relief is introduced, it is vehemently opposed by lenders and often limited to the most destitute of debtors.  These stories also reveal the dark underside of the much-heralded micro-finance industry.

In Cambodia, micro-finance debt has driven millions of borrowers to the the brink of family disaster, as micro-lenders have commonly taken homes and land as collateral for loans averaging only US$3370. When many of these loans inevitably tip into default, borrowers face deprivation of family land, at best, and homelessness at worst. Actually, in the absence of a personal bankruptcy law (which Cambodia still lacks), things can get much worse. If a firesale of the collateral leaves a deficiency, borrowers might be coerced into selling their children's labor or even migrating away to try to escape lender pursuit. In the past decade, the MFI loan portfolio in Cambodia has grown from US$300 million to US$8 billion, about one-third of the entire Cambodian GDP! People around the world have turned to micro-finance to sustain their lifestyles (or just to survive) in an era of increasing government austerity, with disastrous results for many borrowers.

In India, the government continues to delay the introduction of effective personal insolvency relief, and it seems concerned with the interests of only the lending sector in formulating a path to relief for "small distressed borrowers." In a story that fills only half a page, consideration of individual or national economic concerns is not mentioned, but it is noted four times that discussion/negotiation with the "microfinance industry" has occurred, whose satisfaction seems paramount to law reformers. Among the "safeguards" put in place to prevent "abuse" of this new relief are (1) the debtor's gross annual income must not exceed about US$450 ($70 per month), (2) the debtor's total debt must not exceed about US$500, and (3) the debtor's total assets must not exceed US$280. While this may well encompass many poor Indian borrowers in serious distress, it offers no relief to what are doubtless many, many "middle-class" Indians similarly pressed to the brink and straining to cope in a volatile economy.

In South Africa, a decades-long fight to implement effective discharge relief for individual debtors has culminated in a half-hearted revision of the National Credit Act (Bloomberg subscription likely required). The long-awaited revision still promises relief only to a small subset of severely distressed borrowers. The bill offers debt discharge only to "critically indebted" debtors with monthly income below US$500 and unsecured debts below US$3400. A step to be applauded, this still leaves many, many South Africans to contend with a complex web of insolvency-related laws that offers little or no relief to many if not most debtors. And still, banks engaged in the typical gnashing of teeth and shedding of crocodile tears, terribly worried that this new dispensation will "drive up the cost of loans for low-income earners, restrict lending and encourage bad behavior from borrowers." Where have we heard this before? To their credit, South African policymakers apparently "made no attempt to interact with the [lending] industry," though the compromise solution here still leaves much to be desired.

On a brighter note, the country of Georgia is on the verge of adopting major reforms to its laws on enforcement and business insolvency (story available only in the really neat Georgian language, check it out!). In an address to parliamentary committees, the Minister of Justice remarked that a new system of personal insolvency is also in development. Georgia suffers from many of the same problems of micro-finance as Cambodia, so perhaps Cambodia and other similarly situated countries will be able to learn from Georgia's example. We'll see what they come up with.

What Is "Credit"? AfterPay, Earnin', and ISAs

A major issue in consumer finance regulation in mid-20th century was what counted as “credit” and was therefore subject to state usury laws and (after 1968) to the federal Truth in Lending Act. Many states had a time-price differential doctrine that held that when a retailer sold goods for future payment, the differential between the price of a cash sale and that of credit sale was not interest for usury law purposes. State retail installment loan acts began to override the time-price doctrine, however, and the federal Truth in Lending Act and regulations thereunder eventually made clear that for its purposes the difference was a “finance charge” that had to be disclosed in a certain way. 

 

Today, we seem to be coming back full circle to the question of what constitutes “credit.” We’re seeing this is three different product contexts: buy-now-pay-later products like Afterpay; and payday advance products like Bridgit, Dave, and Earnin’; and Income-Sharing Agreements or ISAs (used primarily for education financing). Each of these three product types has a business model that is based on it not being subject to some or all “credit” regulation. Whether those business models are well-founded legally is another matter.

 

Let me briefly recap what is “credit” for different regulatory purposes and then turn to its application to the types of products.

The Mad Mad World of "No Contest" Provisions in Wills

It has been almost twenty-five years since I got hooked on the puzzle of why boilerplate financial contracts, even among the most sophisticated parties, have inefficient terms. Steve Choi and I were taking Marcel Kahan’s Corporate Bond class and we couldn’t understand why the classical model with its highly informed repeat players (with everyone hiring expensive lawyers) wasn’t working to produce the optimal package of contract terms. Marcel presented a very coherent set of explanations for this phenomenon of contract stickiness having to do primarily with network and learning externalities.  And under that model, it was plausible to have equilibria where sophisticated commercial parties and their lawyers could know that they had suboptimal contract terms and yet be somehow unable to change them easily (thereby creating the phenomenon of “sticky” contracts).  Marcel though repeatedly emphasized to us that he had but scratched the surface of a topic worthy of much more investigation (for the classic Kahan & Klausner (1997) paper and its equally wonderful predecessor by Goetz & Scott (1985), see here and here).

Over the past two decades, since the publication of Kahan & Klausner’s sticky boilerplate paper, there have been a number of advances to our thinking about the phenomenon of sticky boilerplate. Most of them, however, have been focused on the worlds of mass market contracts of sophisticated finance or transactions where one of the sides to the transaction is a big repeat player (corporate bonds, sovereign bonds, M&A contracts, insurance). 

A wonderful new boilerplate paper though takes on an altogether unexpected area where I had always thought of the contract-type instruments as being highly tailored: that of Wills. The paper is “Boilerplate No Contest Clauses” posted about a month ago by David Horton (UC Davis) and Reid Weisbord (Rutgers). 

The paper identifies a persistent inefficiency in Wills – an area that I suspect most contract boilerplate scholars are utterly unaware to. That itself is interesting. But this paper goes beyond the traditional boilerplate contract scholarship which, as noted, identified the stickiness problem in mass market contracts.  Wills, as I understand the story that David and Reid tell, tend to always have both an element of tailoring for the individual client and an element of blind unthinking cutting and pasting from prior standard forms. What David and Reid show beautifully in their paper is that the boilerplate portion of the contract (and specifically, the “No Contest” provision) can often undermine the tailored portion that more specifically reflects the intent of the party making the Will.

For those not familiar with these clauses, the following is typical:

If any beneficiary under this Will in any manner, directly or indirectly, contests or attacks this Will or any of its provisions, any share of interest in my estate given to that contesting beneficiary under this Will is revoked . . . . “

Basically, this says: Don’t you dare challenge this Will. If you do, you might lose everything.

Problem is, as David and Reid explain, that there are situations where complications arise with the Will and someone has to go to court to get the complications resolved. That then presents the risk that some dastardly beneficiary will claim that the No Contest clause has been triggered vis-à-vis the innocent beneficiary who is just trying to solve a problem with the Will that the testator didn’t take into account. End result: The intentions of the testator are undermined. Even if the court ultimately tosses the challenges being made on the basis of the No Contest clause, time and money gets wasted.

Why does this clause persist?  The answer given by Reid and David is straightforward: These clauses are cut and paste from prior Wills without thought. They are part of the boilerplate that neither the lawyers nor their clients pay any attention to.  But why not?  The standard explanations from the boilerplate literature such as network/learning externalities, first mover disadvantages, negative signaling, status quo bias, inadequate litigation, etc., do not seem to apply particularly well.  Nor do explanations about big firms who are repeat players exploiting innocent customers who are one shot players.  So, given that the standard explanations do not work, why is the subset of the market for legal services not working?  Are the lawyers not being paid enough to read the boilerplate portions of the Wills and think through the contingencies?  (Best I can tell, the lawyers do actually understand the problem, since there has been lots of litigation over these types of clauses).

Reverse Mortgage Meltdown ... and Gov't Complicity?

USA Today just came out with an interesting expose about reverse mortgages and their negative impact, especially in low-income, African American, urban neighborhoods (highlighting a few in my backyard here in Chicago). I have long been interested in reverse mortgages, touted in TV ads by seemingly trustworthy spokespeople like Henry Winkler and Alex Trebek as sources of risk-free cash for folks enjoying their golden years, and I am always on the lookout for explanations of the pitfalls. Most of these breathless critiques strike me as overkill, but the USA Today story reveals fairly compelling real stories of a few of the ways in which a combination of financial illiteracy and sharp marketing tactics can lead to bad outcomes ranging from rude awakening (heirs having to buy back their childhood homes) to tragedy (simple missed paperwork deadlines leading to foreclosure and an abusive accumulation of default and attorney fee charges).

One line really jumped out at me. In defense of their seemingly hard-hearted and Emersonian-foolish-consistencies-being-the-hobgoblins-of-little-minds conduct, an industry spokesperson deflects, "lenders would prefer to extend the deadlines for older borrowers but fear violating HUD guidelines." Another bank official chimes in, “No matter how heinous or heartbreaking the case, it’s not our call. There’s no wiggle room,” adding that the stress of being unable to behave in a commercially and morally reasonable manner “takes a toll on employees.” [Yes, the unquoted characterization of the rigid lender behavior is mine, not the bank official's].

"Really??!!," I wondered. I wouldn't put any outrage past the Trump administration these days, but forcing banks to foreclose because an elderly surviving spouse overlooked a single piece of paperwork and is prepared to fix the problem a few days past the deadline strikes me as ... hard to believe. Is the government complicit in these reverse mortgage tragedies because it forces lenders to observe rules and deadlines rigidly? If so, how sad and frustrating, and yet another sign of the failures of our modern political stalemate between rational compromise and hysteria, where the latter seems to be winning on all sides.

Home Contract Financing and Black Wealth

A remarkable new quantitative study finds that over two decades, African American home buyers in Chicago lost between $3 and $4 billion in wealth because of credit apartheid. The study authors from research centers at Duke, UIC and Loyola-Chicago reviewed property records for more than 3,000 Chicago homes. During the 1950s and 1960s, up to 95% of homes sold to black buyers were financed with land installment sale contracts rather than mortgages. Mortgage loans were largely unavailable due to continued redlining by banks and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Instead, a limited group of speculators bought homes for cash and resold them with large price markups to newcomers in the Great Migration. The interest rates for  land installment contracts were several points higher than comparable mortgage loans offered to whites. Thus, black home buyers were overcharged for the home price and the interest rate they paid compared with similar white home buyers. The authors quantify this as a 141% race tax on housing.

Buyers financing homes with installment land contracts also face greater risks of losing their homes and accumulated equity than buyers with a deed and mortgage purchase, for reasons we teach, or ought to teach, in any Property Law or Real Estate class in law school. A missed payment on a land contract can mean quick eviction, while a homeowner behind on a mortgage is protected in many states by foreclosure procedures and redemption rights. More importantly, when a bank, FHA or other lender finances a home, the lender has strong incentives to protect the buyer and itself from defective home conditions or title problems. Those protections are missing from the installment land contract financing structure. The Duke study did not include the cost of premature evictions, home repairs, and title problems experienced by black contract buyers, all of which would further magnify the wealth gap between white and black home buyers. 

The Second Circuit Got It Right in Madden v. Midland Funding

Professor Peter Conti-Brown of the Wharton School has written a short article for Brookings decrying the Second Circuit’s 2015 Madden v. Midland Funding decision. Professor Conti-Brown doesn’t like the Madden decision for two reasons. First, he thinks its wrong on the law. Specifically, he thinks it is contrary to the National Bank Act because it "significantly interferes" with a power of national banks—the power to discount (that is sell) loans. Second, he's worried about Madden from a policy standpoint both because he fears that it is unduly cutting of access to credit for low-income households and because he thinks it is reinforcing the large bank’s dominance in the financial system and impairing the rise of non-bank “fintechs”. I disagree with Professor Conti-Brown on the law and think that attacking Madden is entirely the wrong way to address the serious policy question of what sort of limitations there ought to be on the provision of consumer credit. As for fintechs, well, I just don't see any particular reason to favor them over banks, and certainly not at the expense of consumers.  

P2P Payments Fraud

AARP has a nice piece (featuring yours truly) about the consumer fraud risks with peer-to-peer (p2p) payment systems like Zelle and Venmo.  

Both Zelle and Venmo expressly state in their terms of use that they are not for commercial use, yet there is certainly a healthy segment of their use that is commercial.  Some of it is sort of "relational" commercial--paying a music teacher or a barber--someone whom the payor knows, so there's a social mechanism for dealing with disputes and which protects against fraud.  But there is also some use for making commercial payments outside of a relational context--paying for goods purchased on the Internet--and that is very vulnerable to fraud.  

I wish p2p payments systems would do a bit more to highlight to consumers their prohibition on commercial use, including flagging the fraud risk, but I suspect that they have no interest in doing so--while the systems disclaim commercial use, they nonetheless benefit from it, and have little reason to discourage it.  

Deleveraging Is Over

An unsustainable run-up in consumer housing debt and other debt was a fundamental structural cause of the 2008 global financial crisis. Following four years of painfully slow decline, total U.S. consumer debt has now risen back above its 2008 peak, with the growth led by student loan and auto loan debt. Mortgages outstanding are not quite at their 2008 levels, but student loan and auto loan growth more than makes up for the modest home loan deleveraging. Americans are back up to their eyeballs in debt, but now some of the debt burden has shifted from baby boomers to millennials. While the cost of health care may be a key electoral issue for the over-50 crowd, under-40s will be listening for policymakers to offer solutions on student loans.

New (From the Archives) Paper on Determinants of Personal Bankruptcy

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 Center for Community Capital. We just posted this version on SSRN for the first time yesterday in light of continued interest in its questions and findings. The abstract does not give too much detail (see the paper for that), but here it is:

Personal Bankruptcy Decisions Before and After Bankruptcy Reform

Abstract

We examine the personal bankruptcy decisions of lower-income homeowners before and after the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA). Econometric studies suggest that personal bankruptcy is explained by financial gain rather than adverse events, but data constraints have hindered tests of the adverse events hypothesis. Using household level panel data and controlling for the financial benefit of filing, we find that stressors related to cash flow, unexpected expenses, unemployment, health insurance coverage, medical bills, and mortgage delinquencies predict bankruptcy filings a year later. At the federal level, the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform explains a decrease in filings over time in counties that experienced lower filing rates.

New Paper: Consumer Protection After the Global Financial Crisis

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:

Consumer Protection After the Global Financial Crisis

Edward J. Balleisen & Melissa B. Jacoby

Abstract

Like other major events, the Global Financial Crisis generated a large and diffuse body of academic analysis. As part of a broader call for operationalizing the study of crises as policy shocks and resulting responses, which inevitably derail from elegant theories, we examine how regulatory protagonists approached consumer protection after the GFC, guided by six elements that should be considered in any policy shock context. After reviewing the introduction and philosophy of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, created as part of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, we consider four examples of how consumer protection unfolded in the crises’ aftermath that have received less attention. Our case studies investigate a common set of queries. We sought to identify the parties who cared sufficiently about a given issue to engage with it and try to shape policy, as well as the evolving nature of the relevant policy agenda. We also looked for key changes in policy, which could be reflected in various forms—whether establishing an entirely new regulatory agency, formulating novel enforcement strategies, or deflecting policy reforms.

The first of our case studies focuses on operations of the Federal Trade Commission in the GFC’s aftermath. Although the Dodd-Frank Act shifted some obligations toward the CFPB, we find that the FTC continued to worry about and seek to address fraud against consumers. But it tended to focus on shady practices that arose in response to the GFC rather than those that facilitated it. Our second case study examines the Congressional adoption of a carveout from CFPB authority for auto dealers, which resulted from strong lobbying by car companies worried about a cratering sales environment, and the aftermath of the policy. Here, we observe that this carveout allowed a significant amount of troubling auto lending activity to continue and expand, with potentially systemic consequences. Loan servicer misbehavior, particularly in the form of robosigning, is the focus of our third case study. Although Dodd-Frank did not explicitly address robosigning, the new agency it created, the CFPB, was able to draw on its broad authority to address this newly arising problem. And, because the CFPB had authority over student loan servicers, the agency could pivot relatively quickly from the mortgage context to the student loan context. Our fourth and final case study is the rise and fall of Operation Choke Point, an understandably controversial interagency program, convened by the U.S. Department of Justice, which, with the GFC fresh in mind, attempted to curtail fraudulent activities by cutting off access to online payment mechanisms. Here, we see an anti-fraud effort that was particularly vulnerable to a change in presidential administration and political climate because its designers had invested little effort in building public awareness and support for the program.

The Article concludes with an overall assessment and suggestions for other focal points for which our approach would be useful. The examples span a range of other domestic and global policy contexts.

 

 

 

Are Convenience Check Loans Underwritten to Ability-to-Repay?

In my previous post, I complained that convenience check loans weren't underwritten based on ability-to-repay.  That's not to say that there's no underwriting whatsoever.  But it's important to recognize that prescreening for direct mailing for convenience check loans is not the same as underwriting the loans based on ability-to-repay.  For example, Regional Management, on the companies that offers convenience check loans says in its 10-K that:

Each individual we solicit for a convenience check loan has been pre-screened through a major credit bureau or data aggregator against our underwriting criteria. In addition to screening each potential convenience check recipient’s credit score and bankruptcy history, we also use a proprietary model that assesses approximately 25 to 30 different attributes of potential recipients.

That's dandy, but a credit score is a retrospective measure of credit worthiness. It doesn't say anything about whether a borrower has current employment or income, and it doesn't generally capture material obligations like rent or health insurance.

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.