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Jim Campen

Reverse Mortgages Threaten Seniors’ Wealth

October 9, 2009

A new report from the National Consumer Law Center explains in detail how “[a]buses and abusers from the subprime mortgage industry have begun showing up in the reverse mortgage market, putting at risk the equity and savings of millions of seniors.” (Report is here (pdf); press release is here (pdf).)
In the aftermath of the implosion [...]

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Money, Credit, and the Law – Know Your Rights

September 17, 2009

That’s the title of a valuable new video narrated by Professor Richard Alderman, director of the Center for Consumer Law at the University of Houston Law Center.
The video, consisting of easily digestible short chapters, provides help managing personal finances, dealing with credit problems and debt collectors, responding when sued by a creditor, seeking credit counseling, [...]

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Private Student Loans: A Last Resort That’s Too Often Used First

August 31, 2009

Private student loans are more expensive, riskier, and come with fewer borrower protections than federal student loans.  Nevertheless, almost two-thirds of the undergraduates who took out private student loans during the 2007-2008 school year did so without first obtaining the maximum federal loans for which they were qualified.  In fact, over a quarter of students [...]

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Foreclosure Scams: A Growth Industry

August 3, 2009

The unresponsiveness of mortgage servicers to the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure is a national scandal. One consequence of this hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves. As growing numbers of desperate homeowners are unable to get the help they need from their loan servicers, more and more are succumbing to the aggressive sales [...]

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Reverse mortgages: trouble brewing

July 2, 2009

In recent years, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)– the main federal regulator of the nation’s biggest banks – has seemed concerned with consumer protection only when it was acting aggressively to protect “its” banks from the prospect of being sued by state attorneys general for their predatory practices.  The OCC pursued [...]

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Credit CARD Act goes far beyond the Fed’s credit card regs

May 28, 2009

According to an editorial in last Friday’s Washington Post,  the credit card bill that the President signed into law that afternoon “isn’t really needed” because it is “awfully similar” to the regulations on credit cards that were issued by the Federal Reserve last December.
Wrong!
In fact, the new law is remarkably broader and stronger than the [...]

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Subprime lending dropped in ‘07, but people of color still bear the brunt of it (AFFIL Week)

February 11, 2009

Today marks the release of Changing Patterns XV, the fifteenth annual report on mortgage lending in Massachusetts that I’ve prepared for the Massachusetts Community and Banking Council.
Lots of high-cost subprime lenders bit the dust in 2007, so subprime lending fell dramatically that year.  In Massachusetts, there were 5,085 subprime home-purchase loans made, down from 14,639 [...]

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Thank goodness this COP is on the beat (AFFIL Week)

February 10, 2009

On January 29, the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) released its Special Report on Regulatory Reform (PDF link). The COP, established by Congress to oversee the Treasury’s bailout plan, is chaired by Harvard law professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren. The report argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in twenty-five years of financial [...]

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Different crowd, same message

May 28, 2008

I recently had the privilege of attending a small conference at UMass/Amherst in honor of progressive financial guru Jane D’Arista. Details about the conference (The Political Economy of Monetary Policy and Financial Regulation) and about its sponsor, the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), are available here.
Jane worked for a dozen years as a key [...]

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