Category: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

  • The New Usury: The Ability-to-Repay Revolution in Consumer Finance

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    I have a new article out in the George Washington Law Review, entitled The New Usury: The Ability-to-Repay Revolution in Consumer Finance. The abstract is below:

    American consumer credit regulation is in the midst of a doctrinal revolution. Usury laws, for centuries the mainstay of consumer credit regulation, have been repealed, preempted, or otherwise undermined. At the same time, changes in the structure of the consumer credit marketplace have weakened the traditional alignment of lender and borrower interests. As a result, lenders cannot be relied upon to avoid making excessively risky loans out of their own self-interest.

    Two new doctrinal approaches have emerged piecemeal to fill the regulatory gap created by the erosion of usury laws and lenders’ self-interested restraint: a revived unconscionability doctrine and ability-to-repay requirements. Some courts have held loan contracts unconscionable based on excessive price terms, even if the loan does not violate the applicable usury law. Separately, for many types of credit products, lenders are now required to evaluate the borrower’s repayment capacity and to lend only within such capacity. The nature of these ability-to-repay requirements varies considerably, however, by product and jurisdiction. This Article terms these doctrinal developments collectively as the “New Usury.”

    The New Usury represents a shift from traditional usury law’s bright-line rules to fuzzier standards like unconscionability and ability-to-repay. Although there are benefits to this approach, it has developed in a fragmented and haphazard manner. Drawing on the lessons from the New Usury, this Article calls for a more comprehensive and coherent approach to consumer credit price regulation through a federal ability-to-repay requirement for all consumer credit products coupled with product-specific regulatory safe harbors, a combination that offers the best balance of functional consumer protection and business certainty.

     

  • Securitization Trusts Are Subject to the Consumer Financial Protection Act

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The CFPB won a significant case this week that could shake things up in the securitization world. In CFPB v. National Collegiate Master Student Loan Trust, the 3d Circuit held that a securitization trust is a “covered person,” for the purposes of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, putting it within the enforcement ambit of the CFPB.  While securitization trusts themselves are basically passive holding entities for loans, they contract with third-parties (servicers) to manage the loans. That contracting was enough for the Third Circuit to find that the trusts are “engaged” in “extending credit or servicing loans,” and language in the opinion suggests that merely holding the loans would be sufficient. The opinion means that securitization trusts—and therefore securitization investors—face the possibility of liability for servicer wrong-doing.

  • The CFPB’s Proposed Overdraft Regulation

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The CFPB proposed overdraft regulation came out today. It's a big deal. If it becomes effective, it will dramatically reduce overdraft fees at large banks.

    Currently fees for “courtesy” overdraft—where the financial institution is not contractually obligated to allow the overdraft, as opposed to contractual overdraft lines of credit—are not “finance charges,” so the overdraft is not “credit” for purposes of the Truth in Lending Act/Regulation Z because credit requires either a finance charge or a requirement of repayment in over four installments. That means that TILA disclosure requirements do not currently apply to any courtesy overdrafts. 

    The CFPB is proposing changing this for overdrafts that don't fall within a dollar amount safe harbor.

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  • The Section 1071 Small Business Lending Data Collection Rule

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The Senate voted 53-44 to overturn the CFPB's section 1071 small business lending data collection rule under the Congressional Review Act. If the House can ever function, I'd expect that there are the votes there too to overturn the rulemaking, but it's all sort of a show given that President Biden is threatening a veto and there aren't the votes to override a veto.

    So three thoughts on this. First, doing a CRA resolution that has no chance of passing is a huge waste of the most precious commodity in DC, namely Senate floor time. But perhaps that is the point. More time on CRA resolutions, less time available for confirming judges, etc. I'm surprised we don't see continuous filing of CRA resolutions as itself a delay tactic in the Senate.

    Second, imagine for a second that the CRA resolution passed. The CFPB would be precluded from promulgating another rule that is "substantially the same" without new Congressional authorization. But section 1071 would still stand. Is there any way the CFPB could do any data collection rule that is not "substantially the same," in terms of requiring production by small business lenders of data about the borrowers and loans? If so, then it suggests that "substantially the same" must actually be quite narrowly construed (e.g., if rule 1.0 asked about LTV and rule 2.0 did not, they are not "substantially the same"), which has important implications for the CFPB's ability to undertake a new arbitration rulemaking.

    Third, assuming that the resolution fails, we will then have data collection regimes for mortgages and small business loans. That data is important for monitoring against discriminatory lending. Doesn't it seem strange to limit the data collection to just those markets? Why not extend it to the most obvious market, where there have long been concerns about discriminatory lending, namely auto lending, as some have previously suggested?

  • No Virginia, There Really Is No Such Thing as “the Fed”

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    Once again, the WSJ is publishing nonsense about the CFPB. It's really painful to see conservative admin law types write about federal agency structures when they don't understand the basic facts. The WSJ ran an op-ed by Adam White, a think-tanker at AEI and George Mason, that tries to take on the claim that if the CFPB's funding is unconstitutional, so is that of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. But Mr. White runs into trouble with his argument in his first paragraph when he refers to the "Federal Reserve" and "the Fed." The problem: there is no legal entity called "the Federal Reserve." We refer to it that way colloquially, but it's actually more complicated, and the complication really matters here. 

    "The Fed" is actually "the Federal Reserve System," which consists of twelve private regional reserve banks and a federal government agency called the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The Board is a full-fledged federal regulatory agency. It makes rules, engages in supervision of financial institutions, brings enforcement actions, and undertakes administrative adjudication. In short, it does all the same type of things as the CFPB.

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  • CFPB v. Community Financial Services of America

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    With oral argument in CFSA v. CFPB scheduled for tomorrow, it's no surprise that some unfounded claims about the CFPB are getting thrown around by the usual anti-regulation suspects, like the WSJ editorial page and George Will. Given that there's more attention than usual being paid to the Bureau, I figure it's the least I can do to flag what's wrong about these claims. Specifically, I want to address the claim that the Bureau is some uniquely ultra-power federal agency and that its funding has "dual insulation" from Congressional control. 

    Most Powerful Agency, Ever?

    Is the CFPB really the most powerful government agency ever? Puhlease. Federal agencies aren't Pokemon cards with a CP level that can be compared, but even so, it's just ridiculous to claim that the CFPB is the most powerful federal agency around. Its ambit is noticeably narrower than that of the Federal Reserve Board, for example. (There's a reason that Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, is a household name, while Rohit Chopra, the CFPB Director, is not.) 

    Let's get the headline number up. There are 33 million businesses in the United States. The CFPB has some form of regulatory authority over only around 40,000 of them. That 40,000 consists of ~23,000 payday lenders, ~4,800 credit unions, ~4,600 banks ~4,500 debt collection agencies, ~500 nonbank auto lenders, and 410 consumer reporting agencies, and some sundry other entities.  In other words, only 0.1% of all businesses in the United States are under any CFPB jurisdiction (and even that is quite limited, as we will see). That fact alone should be the end to the "most powerful agency, ever," nonsense. 

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  • Community Financial Services of America v. CFPB Amicus Brief

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    This fall the Supreme Court will be hear a case captioned Community Financial Services of America v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dealing with the constitutionality of the CFPB's funding mechanism. I'm pleased to announce that Patricia McCoy and I filed an amicus brief today in support of the CFPB. We were very capably represented by Greg Lipper of LeGrand Law.

    The tl;dr version: if the 5th Circuit's opinion is upheld it will result in market chaos–all of the CFPB's existing regulations will be void, and that includes things on which market actors rely, such as TILA disclosure safe harbors and ability-to-repay rule safeharbors. Moreover, there's no way to cabin the 5th Circuit's opinion to the CFPB–if the Bureau's funding is unconstitutional, so too is that of every federal banking regulator, including the Federal Reserve Board. There's simply no credible way to do a surgical strike on the Bureau's funding without collateral damage of economic havoc.

  • CFPB Details “Abusive” in Policy Statement and Speech

    Posted by

    Dalie Jimenez

    In a few hours, I'll have the pleasure of hosting CFPB Director Rohit Chopra for a virtual talk at UCI Law (today at 12pm PDT, 3pm PDT). You can still join us by registering for the Zoom link here.

    Director Chopra will be discussing the new policy statement on the CFPB's "abusive" authority that the Bureau issued a few minutes ago. The statement "summarizes precedent and establishes a framework to help federal and state enforcers identify when companies engage in abusive conduct."

    The full policy statement is available here and will be published in the Federal Register with a 90-day comment period that closes on July 3. I imagine we might be talking more about it and its implications here on CreditSlips in the coming days.

    Cfpbtalk

  • SDNY: EFTA Applies to Crypto

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    I'm teaching cryptocurrency today in my Payment Systems class, and I'd been puzzling about why no one has applied the Electronic Fund Transfers Act and Reg E thereunder to crypto: after all, if you have a crypto account with an exchange, it would seem to be an "account" at a "financial institution" that is primarily for personal, family, or household purposes and is used for electronic transfers of "funds." In fact, I had just emailed Bob Lawless for a sanity check on this, when I came across a very recent SDNY decision that held that the EFTA applies to crypto. That's a huge consumer protection win. Reg E has important consumer protections regarding unauthorized transactions, error resolution, and provision of receipts and periodic statements. It also creates huge compliance headaches for crypto exchanges, which are not set up for dealing with any of those problems. All of the Zelle scam error resolution issues are now going to become crypto scam error resolution issues. And the ruling also indicates that consumer protection at cryptocurrency exchanges is now squarely within the existing regulatory authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This could get interesting. 

  • Dual Insulation? The Fifth Circuit’s Factual Misunderstanding of CFPB Funding

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    I know I’m carrying around some extra weight.  But I don’t think it’s quite double insulation.  That sounds like something you need if you’re going on a polar expedition or are really concerned about the heating bill.  But the concept of "dual insulation" plays a big role in the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd. v. CFPB, which held the CFPB’s funding mechanism to be unconstitutional because it is not an annual appropriation from Treasury.   

    In this post, I’ll discuss some of the background on the case, the poorly understood nature of the CFPB’s funding (factual mistakes about which loomed large in the Fifth Circuit’s decision), and the challenge the Fifth Circuit faced in trying to differentiate the CFPB’s funding from that of a host of other federal regulatory agencies (that’s where dual insulation comes in).

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