Consumer Law & Policy Blog

Dayan's Chain of Title

by Jeff Sovern

I'm listening to the audio version of David Dayan's book Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud. A lot of it will be familiar to those who followed media reports of the foreclosure crisis and robo-signing, but having it all pulled together gives it considerable impact, and those who didn't follow the reports and believe in the rule of law will find it particularly alarming. I will probably have more to say about it when I am further along in it.  But for the moment, I thought this was an interesting and disturbing quote:

Servicers turned HAMP into a predatory lending program, squeezing borrowers for every payment they could get and then foreclosing anyway. After keeping people in trial modifications for a year, servicers would suddenly reject permanent relief and demand the difference between the trial and original payment, under threat of eviction. Bank of American employees later testified they were given Target and Best Buy gift cards as bonuses for lying to homeowners, denying HAMP modifications, and pushing people into foreclosure.

Incidentally, so far in my listening, the work of three consumer law professors has been mentioned: Katie Porter, Chris Peterson, and Alan White. It's nice to see members of the consumer law professor community acknowledged.

 

 

Waldman Article: Manipulating Trust on Facebook

Ari Ezra Waldman of New York Law has written Manipulating Trust on Facebook, 29 Loyola Consumer Law Review.  Here is the abstract:

Facebook is built on gathering massive amounts of information from its users. To maximize the data it collects, Facebook relies on the trust we have in our friends to encourage us to share even more, and it designs its platform to reflect and leverage trust. But this strategy also manipulate us into sharing personal information with websites, advertisers, and third party partners we’ve never met or heard of. When it does this, Facebook crosses a line from social space to manipulative force.

Consumer Reports/Revealnews.org Report on Student Loan Debt

by Jeff Sovern

The current issue of Consumer Reports cover reads "I kind of ruined my life by going to college."  Consumer Reports teamed with RevealNews.org to cover student loans.  You can read the RevealNews.org coverage here. Here's the upsetting beginning:

A generation ago, Congress privatized a student loan program intended to give more Americans access to higher education.

In its place, lawmakers created another profit center for Wall Street and a system of college finance that has fed the nation’s cycle of inequality. Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

Today, just about everyone involved in the student loan industry makes money off students – the banks, private investors, even the federal government.

College is today's ticket to the middle class--which means that for many, entrance to the middle class comes only by assuming "the worst kind of debt."  I wonder: the community of consumer law professors is so small: are there any law professors who specialize in studying student loans?  There certainly should be; the area is ripe for study.