Last May, I wrote about the Ohio law that, the legislature intended, would put the screws to payday lenders in that state. The law limited payday loans to four short-term loans a year and capped annual interest rates at 28......

The Austin-Statesman points out one of the many unintended consequences of federal government's deft management of monetary policy: the diminishing funding for legal services for the poor. Rock-bottom interest rates, part of the Federal Reserve's attempt to prop up a crumbling economy, are having an...

To no one's surprise, (certainly not ours), first lien residential mortgage loan cramdowns will soon be coming to a bankruptcy court near you. Although we haven't seen the bill yet, Dick Durbin's office announced today that he, Chuck ("Bank Run") Schumer and Chris ("I Boinked Princess Leia") Dodd, h...

For decades, there's been a split between those who think that consumers should be free to make informed decisions about credit, good or bad, as long as they have available to them the relevant information to make such informed decisions. Others argue that the average consumer will never have enough...

According to Ben Bernanke, sometime next week the Federal Reserve Board will finally issue the useless regulations "cracking down on subprime and exotic lending" first proposed last December that even an empty suit like Jim Cramer understood "mean nothing." It's a classic case of fighting the last w...

It may be time to pull out the figure skates and do a "Hamill camel" in Hell: the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal agree on legislative policy. Well, not really, but at least they both agree that one piece of legislation is a piece of trash. A couple of m...

The problem with public prognostications, especially by economists, is that some jerk memorializes the predictions and then waits a couple of years to remind everyone that the crystal ball must have been on the blink. In January 2006, the Mortgage Bankers Association's three-year economic forecast c...

Recently, John Carey at Dealbreaker raised a subject that  I also raised a few years ago and that, at the time, engendered some spittle-spewing outrage on some consumer financial advocacy blogs and message boards: the financial illiteracy of most Americans. In a February 2005 post about the fea...

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ---Hunter S. Thompson Whenever pressure is applied to fragile minds, those minds tend to bend. The latest example of an idea that demands a reply of "get bent" is "Own To Rent." As discussed today by Paul Jackson at Housing Wire, thi...

Sheila Bair won't quit. Like the Everyready Bunny, she just keeps going, and going, and going, on and on, singing the same old tired, sad, off-key tune. The fact that her intended audience continues to passively-aggressively ignore her when she talks to them and, when her back's turned, to give her ...