Jim Devine wrote:
Charles Brown wrote:
There are Truth-in-Lending laws. They can be strengthened. I get the impression
what we had to work with in Legal Services from the 70's was weakened by
Reaganism. The target should be predatory lending practices, not so much loans
to people who are high risk to default.
...agreed. I think, however, that the phenomenon is bigger than
Reaganism. It's part of the world-wide neoliberal policy revolution,
led not only by Reagan but by Thacher and Pinochet.
There were somewhat different contexts for the various existing consumer
regs, most dating to the late 1960s when credit was often too scarce for
poor people, hence by 1977 a Community Reinvestment Act came which
encouraged ghetto lending (though it had no teeth and only in 1988 was
the first regulatory hit on a bank for geographical discrimination -
Continental Illinois - recorded). My first job after college was as a
bank examiner in the Philly Fed, as the deregulation process started.
There were some three dozen consumer protection laws then. I have no
idea what's been trashed since. But I think more than merely a set of
policy shifts to deregulate financial markets, the other process to mark
here is the rise of financial speculation and the real estate bubble,
interlinked and dangerous to everyone, especially those now facing
massive negative equity. What protest movements are brewing? Haven't
seen much from the US, except one demo on Wall Street a few days back.
