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Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) is calling on Wells Fargo to disclose the size of a potential problem with two of its popular checking accounts that may have left some customers confused about how to avoid fees, the Washington Post reported. The bank’s Everyday Checking and Opportunity Checking accounts both include a $10 monthly charge except if the customer meets one of several conditions, including making 10 transactions a month. But some customers may not have realized ATM withdrawals didn’t count toward those transactions, the bank has acknowledged. Wells Fargo potentially collected “hundreds of millions of dollars” in fees from customers confused by the rules, Porter said in a letter yesterday to the bank’s chief executive, Charles W. Scharf. The bank provided “incomplete information over a span of multiple years” even though it knew some customers were “confused” by its policies, Porter said in a letter to two of the bank’s regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Trade Commission. The confusion led some customers to unexpectedly trigger more fees by overdrawing their accounts, she said. Read more. 

Porter was the provided an address at ABI's luncheon at NCBJ's annual conference. Video of the address will be coming soon to ABI social media!

Colleges can be forced to return tuition payments made for students whose parents can’t cover their own debts, according to a federal appeals court ruling that opens up higher education institutions to more litigation in bankruptcy courts, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. An appeals court in Boston said on Tuesday that tuition payments can be recovered when a student’s parents later declare bankruptcy, the first appellate decision to address squarely whether such expenses can be taken back and redistributed. Lawsuits targeting tuition payments have become popular among bankruptcy trustees tasked with digging up funds after parents file for bankruptcy. The results have been mixed in the nation’s bankruptcy courts, with some judges shielding colleges and sometimes the students themselves from having to return tuition money. Many schools have opted to settle with trustees rather than test the controversial lawsuits in the courts. Tuesday’s ruling sided with a bankruptcy trustee who sued Sacred Heart University of Fairfield, Conn., to claw back tuition paid on behalf of a student whose parents were involved in a multimillion-dollar fraud that sent her father to prison. The decision said that because parents don’t benefit economically for sending adult children to college, the tuition they paid can be unwound. The tuition payments “furnished nothing of direct value” to creditors of the parents, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

U.S. consumer prices rebounded more than expected in October and underlying inflation picked up, which together with abating trade tensions and fears of a recession, support the Federal Reserve’s signal for no further interest rate cuts in the near term, Reuters reported. The Labor Department said yesterday that its consumer price index increased 0.4 percent last month as households paid more for energy products, healthcare, food and a range of other goods. That was the largest gain in the CPI since March and followed an unchanged reading in September. In the 12 months through October, the CPI increased 1.8 percent after climbing 1.7 percent in September.  Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI rose 0.2 percent after edging up 0.1 percent in September. The core CPI rose as healthcare costs jumped by the most in more than three years. There were also increases in prices of used cars and trucks and recreation and rents.