Last week, a New Jersey court ruled that a couple who had been seriously injured in an accident riding in an Uber forfeited their right to sue Uber because their 12-year-old had clicked on a pop-up box in order to track her Uber Eats pizza order a year earlier. The food delivery app contained a forced arbitration clause that the court said invalidated their right to hold Uber accountable in court.
Problems are brewing in a scheme that is bigger than the Australian economy and almost completely without federal oversight. It is called private credit — large scale lending, but not by banks — and has surged from less than $300 billion in loans in 2013 to over $2.1 trillion globally today. This unregulated market has become yet another tool for the private equity industry to pursue leveraged buyouts and leaves target companies on the hook to repay the new mountains of debt. If this large pool of unregulated loans go sour, the distress could spread into the broader financial system, including traditional banks, and pose systemic risk to the financial system.
Today, the Justice Department released a new approach to bank merger enforcement that brings the woefully outdated bank merger guidelines into the 21st century. The Justice Department announced that it would apply the greatly improved overall merger guidelines, which were released in 2023, to bank mergers as well. The bank merger rules that are currently in place date from the era of dial-up modems and are totally insufficient to address the complex market power issues posed by many proposed bank mergers — including the pending Capital One-Discover merger.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Powell, you should recuse yourself from the consideration of the Basel III Endgame regulatory capital rule to preserve the integrity of Federal Reserve regulatory decision-making and avoid the appearance of impropriety that would undermine public perception of the central bank’s independence and impartiality. Meeting with big bank CEOs in secret creates the appearance that powerful regulated entities cannot merely influence rulemaking during the public notice and comment period and through their policy arguments, but that they can meet off the record and set regulatory red lines which federal authorities will not cross.
Does paying a $20 “convenience fee” each month on top of your rent just to pay your rent sound reasonable to you? What about paying your landlord a “January fee” just because it happens to be January? Or paying an extra $40 a month for a mandatory “valet trash service” you never wanted in the first place? As unfair and infuriating as these scenarios may seem, paying outrageous, indefensible junk fees is an increasingly common reality for renters in this country.
On Friday, the U. S. Department of Justice took on Wall Street landlords and increasingly unaffordable rents by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, accusing the private-equity-owned firm of facilitating price fixing among the country’s largest corporate landlords. Joined by eight state attorneys general, the lawsuit details how RealPage’s rent-setting software uses private information to raise rents – and, by extension, landlord profits – well beyond what is fair to the general public.