Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, said communities of color often have the highest medical debt rates for many reasons. “Black and Latine families are more likely to have jobs without access to health insurance, and so that would drive up medical debt,” Zinner explained. “There’s also been disparate health treatments for these communities.”
The Treasury Department released two new rules requiring the disclosure of real estate ownership transparency that will make it easier to identify corporate real estate backers and crack down on money laundering in the real estate sector. This announcement comes the week after the Department of Justice launched a lawsuit against RealPage for facilitating rent price fixing by corporate landlords, and together represent major back-to-back tenant victories against corporate landlords and their privately-funded financial backers
More than 160 consumer, labor, civil rights, faith-based, and community organizations submitted a comment letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in support of its proposed interpretive rule ensuring important legal protections for consumers who use earned wage advance (EWA) or other fintech cash advance products that need to be repaid with the borrower’s next paycheck. The letter calls for clearer cost and fee disclosures for these workplace payday loans.
Critics say Scalia is simply riding a political wave. “He latched on to the judiciary at a time when the Republican blockades in the Senate and then the Trump presidency were turning it into a right-wing redoubt and when Wall Street lobbies were opening their wallets to stop good policy aimed at helping investors and consumers,” said Carter Dougherty of Americans for Financial Reform.
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.
While Disney’s legal ploy seems utterly crazy, most attempts to invalidate forced arbitration clauses are unsuccessful. As a result, forced arbitration clauses pop up in nearly every consumer and employee contract because companies know that people cannot fight back. When you click yes on terms and conditions for subscriptions or services or sign your credit card or employment agreement, you are signing away your legal rights.
Americans for Financial Reform recently joined several consumer protection organizations in an amicus brief in Chamber of Commerce v. CFPB, which was filed by Democracy Forward in the 5th Circuit in August 2024. This brief supports the CFPB’s 2022 clarification in its Supervision and Examination Manual that “discriminatory acts or practices” in the provision of financial services may be “unfair” under the Dodd-Frank Act. The brief asks the 5th Circuit to reverse the judgment of the district court, and hold that the CFPB has statutory authority to consider discriminatory conduct an “unfair” practice.
The Senate Agriculture Committee is developing legislation aimed at closing the regulatory oversight gap that the cryptocurrency lobby insists is a problem. True, the crypto industry is highly volatile and riddled with scams that expose those that buy cryptocurrencies and tokens to substantial financial losses. But that’s a problem of enforcing existing rules, not regulation. The proposed bill purports to provide regulatory guardrails to this crypto Wild West, but ultimately would give a federal imprimatur to the crypto industry while only offering the patina of the necessary investor and market safeguards needed to protect vulnerable investors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a new standard from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) that clarifies the “General Responsibilities” of an auditor in conducting a public company audit. AFREF and Public Citizen submitted a comment to the PCAOB on the proposed standard.