Archive for January, 2007

An update on the Senate hearings, courtesy of the American Bankruptcy Institute:

Consumerist was on top of things while I was in a mediation this morning.
Inside organized credit card fraud
David Thomas is a former con artist who worked for the FBI running a credit-card-trading site used to track crooks, and Wired has begun posting a three-part series about his work.
10 shopping tricks that stores hate

Buying Loss Leaders [...]

Dr. Morgan is under fire again, this time by the Center for Responsible Lending, which offers a far more in-depth critique of Morgan’s study than I did. CRL tears into the nitty-gritty and finds that not only is Morgan’s logic flawed, but so are his statistics. [via U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog]

HOME Line offers eight useful forms for Minnesota tenants on their website. (They also offer great free information to tenants if you call their hotline.) The following form letters are available:

Demand for property
Guest rights (if your landlord is trying to limit your visitors)
Neighbor violations
Privacy letter
Repair request
Sample residential lease (okay, not a letter, but useful)
Security deposit

Use [...]

The next installment of “The Myth of the Rational Borrower” by Ted Janger & Susan Block-Lieb is now up on Credit Slips. In this post, the professors examine their predictions about the effects of BAPCA of their “heuristic borrower” is more accurate:

That the consumer bankruptcy filing rate would fall (no big surprise there).
That the [...]

I check my Site Meter stats regularly, like the egomaniacal blogger I am, and was thrilled to find that someone typed the above search phrase into Google and ended up here at Caveat Emptor. When I checked the search, I was tickled pink to find out that Caveat Emptor is the first hit when you [...]

The Senate Banking Committee is holding hearings on the credit card industry. The hearings go by the catchy title “Examining the Billing, Marketing, and Disclosure Practices of the Credit Card Industry, and Their Impact on Consumers.” The all-star cast:

Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottleib Professor of Law and author of The Two Income Trap: Why Middle Class [...]

TLPJ’s Fall 2006 newsletter (PDF link), “Public Justice”, just came to my attention, and it is full of consumer law news. Here is a summary:

[Crossposted at SoloSmallTech]
From BoingBoing: ReasonableAgreement.org, the anti-EULA.
READ CAREFULLY. By [accepting this material|accepting this payment|accepting this business-card|viewing this t-shirt|reading this sticker] you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS [...]

Ted Janger & Susan Block-Lieb posted part two of “The Myth of the Rational Borrower” at Credit Slips yesterday. It’s a lot of consumer science geek speak, but pretty insightful into the borrower’s mind.
Here’s what I take away from this installment: Even if borrowers do use a pseudo-logical approach to the decision to borrow, their [...]

St. Paul apparently intends to start inspecting one- and two-unit rental properties periodically. Previously, inspections were either at the request of a tenant or (I assume) in the course of landlord licensing. According to the ACLU, periodic inspections violate tenants’ right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures.
True, probably, but they also protect tenants [...]

Consumerist linked to this Bankrate.com report about Chase Bank’s decision to end double-cycle billing. Says Chase’s chief marketing officer, “In our continuing review of customer feedback, we found that this practice was difficult to understand.”
To say the least. Basically, they billing every two months, instead of every month. The only clear reason was that it [...]

One of the victims of Miss “Ida Mae James” this Star Tribune article, came to see me a few months ago. For various reasons, we decided not to bring a civil lawsuit, but in any case, it is good to see the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office taking the initiative and pursuing a lawsuit like this. [...]

Hot on the heels of the foreclosure over-exposure in the news, consumer attention seems to have shifted to payday lending. Consumerist mashed together a map of payday loan centers with a map of census information, and the result is clear: payday lenders do, indeed, target less-than-affluent neighborhoods.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, however, although it might cause [...]

It was amusing at first, but it got old. Back to me, myself, and I.

In the wake of Donald Morgan’s staff report for the Fed, I have been thinking a lot about predatory lending, and more particularly about the myth of the rational borrower in a rational marketplace that Morgan seems to rely on in “Defining and Detecting Predatory Lending.” Lo and behold, along comes Credit Slips with a [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature last Friday (yes, we are catching up on last week’s news this morning) on the surprises that may be in store for a new homeowner in an “inclusionary housing” unit. Inclusionary housing is a popular form of affordable housing that is designed to integrate affordable housing into “regular” [...]

Last week we blogged about the Fed staff article “Defining and Detecting Predatory Lending”, by Donald P. Morgan. At the time, however, we did not have an actual copy of the article in our hot little hands Now we do. As we said before, the article posits that the availability of credit is welfare enhancing, [...]

According to an article in the Detroit News last week, Fairway Trails Apartments in Ypsilanti, Michigan, will pay $50,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a disabled man who asked to delay his rent payment by a few days to coincide with the arrival of his Social Security check.
The lawsuit alleged that Fairway Trails retaliated [...]

Because we receive quite a lot of spam, we do moderate our comments. In order to be an “approved” commenter, you just have to make one comment that doesn’t try to sell us on cialis, viagra, online gambling, etc. After that, your comments will go through without going into the moderation queue.
So don’t panic if [...]