Law Commons^™

The Cfpb’S Endaround, Chris O'Brien

Catholic University Law Review

The financial crisis of 2008 led Congress to enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to better protect consumers. Although Dodd-Frank and the CFPB introduced sweeping changes to many areas of financial lending, automobile dealers and financers were expressly excluded from oversight by the CFPB. Despite this express limitation on the CFPB’s authority, the Bureau nonetheless expanded its definition of “larger participants” to encompass automobile dealers and financiers. This action has resulted in duplicative regulatory oversight and increased costs to consumers, which in turn, imposes additional burdens on those …

Making Innovation More Competitive: The Case Of Fintech, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Finance startups are offering automated advice, touchless payments, and other products that could bring great societal benefits, including lower prices and expanded access to credit. Yet unlike in other digital arenas in which American companies were global leaders, such as search engines and ride hailing, the U.S. has lagged in consumer finance. This Article posits that the current competition framework is holding back consumer financial innovation. It then identifies a contributor that has yet to be articulated: the organizational design of administrative agencies. Competition authority—including antitrust and the extension of business licenses—is spread across at least five regulators. Each is …

The Hausmann-Gorky Effect, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza

Faculty Scholarship

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist, Ricardo Hausmann, in May 2017, may have shown an alternative path to the goal of increasing the cost of borrowing for despotic governments. Hausmann, in his Op Ed, had sought to produce a pricing penalty on the entire Venezuelan debt stock by trying to shame JPMorgan into removing Venezuelan bonds from its emerging …

Postal Banking's Public Benefits, Mehrsa Baradaran

Scholarly Works

The basic idea of postal banking is to have a public bank that would offer a wide range of transaction services, including deposit-taking and small lending. Post offices could offer these services at a much lower cost than banks and the fringe banking industry because (1) they can use natural economies of scale and scope to lower the costs of the products; (2) their existing infrastructure significantly reduces overhead costs, and (3) they do not have profit-demanding shareholders and would be able to offer products at cost.

Consumer Bitcredit And Fintech Lending, Christopher K. Odinet

Christopher K. Odinet