Debt Collectors’ Harassment Tactics Are Put On Notice For First Time In 40 Years

Debt collectors, either in-house or third-party entities in the business of trying to get people to pay up debts that they owe for things like student loans or medical bills, have become notorious for their often harassing tactics. Consumers have complained of debt collectors calling them endlessly while threatening violence, lying, and using profane language in trying to cajole them into paying, sometimes for debts they don’t even owe.

But on Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, released new proposed rules to rein in the industry, the first time a federal regulator is cracking down on the industry in nearly four decades. It wants to limit how many times a collector can contact a consumer, require them to have better information about the debts they try to collect, and make it easier for consumers to fight debts they say they don’t actually owe.

Congress passed a law in 1977 that was meant to get rid of abusive debt collection practices by imposing restrictions on their activities as well as disclosure requirements. But until the CFPB came along, there was no federal agency that could issue regulations to make sure that the law was being implemented.

In that time, the industry has grown such that a huge share of Americans are touched by it. As of 2014, about 77 million Americans, or about a third of people with a credit file, had a debt that was in collection. The CFPB found in a recent study that about a third of all consumers had been contacted by a collector in the last year.

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Trump Said He Would Bring Jobs Back To The Country. He Just Quietly Hired 78 Foreign Workers

And I am sure all party candidates will be paying attention with this..

Donald Trump has made restoring American jobs a centerpiece of his campaign, a pledge he reiterated last week when he accepted the Republican nomination for president: “I’m going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America,” he said.

This month, Trump is bringing jobs to Florida, as he looks to hire 78 servers, housekeepers, and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and the nearby Trump National Golf Club, Jupiter.

But instead of making sure those jobs go to Americans, he is seeking to import foreign workers for the positions, which pay $10.17 an hour for housekeepers, $11.13 an hour for servers, and $12.74 for cooks. He filed applications this month claiming he couldn’t find enough Americans to do that work, and is seeking temporary visas to bring in 65 workers at Mar-a-Lago along with another seven waiters and six cooks at the golf club.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. A call to Mar-a-Lago was not returned, and an employee at the Jupiter golf club declined to comment. But in the past, Trump has defended his use of guest workers by saying there was no other way to fill the jobs.

“You can’t get help,” Trump told MSNBC’s Morning Joe in September. “Getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible.”

Officials at a nearby career services agency have seen it differently. Last year, Tom Veenstra, a senior director at Palm Beach’s career services center, told BuzzFeed Newsthat he had “hundreds of people in our database that would qualify for a lot of those hospitality jobs.”

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Single-family rental investors struggle to make money in California

Housingwire:

10. Portland, Oregon with a cap rate of 3.8%

9. Sacramento, California with a cap rate of 3.7%

8. Seattle, Washington with a cap rate of 3.5%

7. New York City, New York with a cap rate of 3.5%

6. Oakland, California with a cap rate of 3.5%

5. San Diego, California with a cap rate of 3.5%

4. Los Angeles, California with a cap rate of 3.1%

3. Orange County, California with a cap rate of 2.7%

2. San Jose, California with a cap rate of 2.6%

1. San Francisco, California with a cap rate of 2.5%

No one envies the plight of the homebuyers in California, who struggle against low inventory, high demand, and rising prices. Due to a recent rise in inventory, however, it could be getting slightly better.

 

Wells Fargo Said to Face U.S. Probe Over Soldiers’ Car Seizures

• DOJ reviewing company’s compliance with military lending law
• Bank’s vehicle repossessions also under regulatory scrutiny

Wells Fargo & Co. is facing a U.S. investigation into whether it improperly repossessed cars owned by members of the military, according to two people with knowledge of the probe.

In their review, the Justice Department and bank regulators are examining Wells Fargo’s compliance with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which in most cases requires that firms obtain a court order before seizing vehicles from soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. The government and Wells Fargo have begun discussing how to compensate borrowers who might have been affected, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the investigation isn’t public.

Shielding soldiers from financial stress has been a priority for lawmakers, and the Justice Department has recently stepped up enforcement actions against banks for taking assets illegally. Banco Santander SA’s U.S. unit agreed to pay $9 million last year over allegations that it improperly confiscated 1,112 vehicles from military members, the largest settlement ever obtained in a case involving repossessions of automobiles with delinquent loans.

Catherine Pulley, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, declined to comment. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates Wells Fargo’s banking unit, also declined to comment.

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Indiana Secretary of State Lawson Reaches Settlement with JPMorgan Chase

INDIANAPOLIS –

The Indiana Secretary of State’s office has announced a settlement with New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) over the company’s investment advisory business in Indiana. The $950,000 settlement comes after Connie Lawson’s office alleged the company did not disclose important information regarding its investment services to clients.

The Secretary of State’s Office says between 2008 and 2014, JPMorgan Chase did not inform clients of its use of a model that guided clients to purchase the company’s proprietary products. Lawson says there was no substantial difference between JPMorgan’s products and a third-party product.

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This is the exact scenario Edward Snowden worried: Future Trumps

Edward Snowden Retweeted

This is also the exact scenario @Snowden warned about when he first went public. He was worried about future Trumps. pic.twitter.com/jOmpjFxir8

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) July 27, 2016

 

 

New Jersey Student Loan Agency to Staff: Don’t Tell Borrowers About Help Unless They Ask

Wow!

It’s yet another obstacle for borrowers from the country’s largest state-based college loan program.

Some restaurants have secret menus, special items that you can only get if you know to ask. New Jersey’s student loan program has secret options, too — borrowers may be able to get help from the agency, but only if they know to ask.

New Jersey has the largest state-based student loan program in the country, with particularly stringent terms that can lead to financial ruin, as ProPublica and the New York Times recently detailed. The agency overseeing the program says it has a policy to help some families if the children who were supposed to benefit from the loans die.

But internal emails show that staffers at the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, or HESAA, have been instructed not to tell families that they may qualify for help unless they explicitly ask.

“Families of deceased borrowers (or surviving cosigners) must inquire if HESAA has a policy on loan forgiveness,” a supervising staffer wrote in an email to employees in May 2016. “We should not be volunteering this information.”

“FAMILIES OF DECEASED BORROWERS (OR SURVIVING COSIGNERS) MUST INQUIRE IF HESAA HAS A POLICY ON LOAN FORGIVENESS. WE SHOULD NOT BE VOLUNTEERING THIS INFORMATION.” (p. 1)

View entire document with DocumentCloud

Similar instructions were sent out three years earlier. “Only advise the cosigner/coborrower about loan forgiveness when asked,” wrote the same staffer in a 2013 email about what to do when borrowers die. A senior supervisor was cc’ed on both emails.

“ONLY ADVISE THE COSIGNER/COBORROWER ABOUT LOAN FORGIVENESS WHEN ASKED.”(p. 2)

View entire document with DocumentCloud

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Hillary Clinton Talks Tough on Shadow Banking, But Blackstone Is Celebrating at the DNC

David Dayen

July 28 2016, 10:38 a.m.

And yes, Wall Street and big corporation donors are crawling around at the DNC event. Money needs to be out of politics for good. And a definite NO for Hamilton “Tony” James, Blackstone COO, for U.S. Treasury head if there is a Clinton Administration!!! Great reporting, David!

Blackstone, the giant Wall Street private equity firm, will hold an invitation-only reception before the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The event, at the swanky Barnes Foundation art museum, includes the usual perks for attendees: free food, drink, and complimentary shuttle buses to the final night of the convention.

What’s unusual is that the host is precisely the kind of “shadow banker” that Hillary Clinton has singled out as needing more regulation in her rhetoric about getting tough on Wall Street.

But Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Hamilton “Tony” James doesn’t seem the least bit intimidated.

James has been a stalwart supporter of Barack Obama, holding fundraisers for him at his home, even while other Wall Street titans criticized him — in fact the co-founder of James’s own company, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, once likened Obama’s push to increase taxes on private-equity firms to a “war,” saying: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Last December, James hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for Hillary Clinton that featured Warren Buffett. He’s made six-figure donations to the Center for American Progress, known as Clinton’s White House in exile, and sits on CAP’s Board of Trustees. And he has made no secret of wanting to hold a high-level position in a future Democratic administration, perhaps even Treasury Secretary.

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The Elephant in the Room – Why no TBTF Prosecutions?

Now this is a topic of discussion for who ever becomes the next President…

The elephant in the room is still why there have been no criminal prosecutions of the banks, executives and Wall Street traders who were primarily responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. There has been no obvious answer, although our Department of Justice continues to dance around the question.

In his most recent article, my friend William D. Cohan, author of the newly released bookThe Price of Silence, and several  outstanding books on the financial crisis, gives us a clue and poses some thought provoking questions.  A former investigative reporter for the Raleigh Times, he worked on Wall Street for seventeen years as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker.

In this recent post, he states “One of the enduring mysteries of the 2008 financial crisis has been why the Justice Department made so few attempts to prosecute the individuals responsible for it, given the abundance of tangible evidence of wrongdoing by Wall Street bankers, traders and executives in the years leading up to the great unwinding.”

A mystery indeed.

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Regards,

Richard

Richard M. Bowen III
richard@richardmbowen.com
www.richardmbowen.com/
214- 604-5492

Netflix to bring ‘Panama Papers’ to life with new feature film

Netflix is looking for its Spotlight.

The Los Gatos-based streaming service announced Tuesday that it is tackling the definitive story behind The Panama Papers, which some deem the biggest leak in the history of journalism.

The leak released 2.6 terabytes of data in 11.5 million documents tracking billions of dollars over almost 40 years. In the process, world leaders, athletes and celebrities around the globe were implicated.

More than 370 journalists from more than 100 media outlets in almost 80 countries around the world worked on the story, but it was German journalists Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer — and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — that took the lead.

Netflix has acquired the rights to Obermaier and Obermayer’s book The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

Read on.