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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate possible insider trading of shares of student loan company Navient Corp., Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon) said Monday in a letter to the agency chairman, Jay Clayton, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The trades occurred just before public disclosure of a letter from the Department of Education to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that marked an important shift in Trump administration policy. The change — that the Education Department would no longer share information on the student loan market with the CFPB — was significant enough that it later prompted one analyst to upgrade Navient shares to a “buy” rating. The circumstances surrounding the well-timed trades and the publication of the letter “raise questions about whether one or more [Education] Department officials may have engaged in the unauthorized disclosure of material, nonpublic information,” the two Democrats wrote in the letter. They echoed an Oct. 10 letter from the AFL-CIO, in which the labor organization called attention to a series of well-timed trades before the Labor Day weekend. The SEC should “examine the trading in Navient’s common stock on Aug. 31,” the AFL-CIO said.

Retailers may be doling out in-store discounts, but when it comes to credit cards, they’re increasingly charging more, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. Interest rates on store cards, which have been inching up for years, now average about 25 percent, according to data from CreditCards.com, part of an online credit card marketplace. And, for the first time, at least one retail card commands a rate above 30 percent. A card offered by BrandSource, a network of locally owned appliance, electronics and home goods stores, comes with an interest rate of 30.49 percent. Three others — Big Lots, Piercing Pagoda and Zales — have rates of 29.99 percent.

The four top American banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — together made more than $4 billion in pretax income from their credit card businesses from July through September, the New York Times reported today. The amount of debt owed by American consumers, which receded in the wake of the financial crisis, is again on the rise. Outstanding credit card debt — the total balances that customers roll from month to month — hit a record $1 trillion this year, according to the Federal Reserve. The number of Americans with at least one credit card has reached 171 million, the highest level in more than a decade, according to TransUnion, a credit-reporting company.

A judge who imposed a $45 million penalty on Bank of America Corp. over a foreclosure on a California couple still isn’t ready to forget the case he described as a “Kafkaesque nightmare,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein voiced exasperation yesterday as the bank sought for the third time to win his approval of a confidential settlement that would nix the monetary penalty and also erase the 107-page ruling he issued in March detailing the bank’s “callous” and “cruel” treatment of the Sundquist family after they sought a mortgage modification. The judge said that it looked to him like the bank was “holding the Sundquists hostage” by making the settlement contingent on the ruling being dismissed. Jonathan Hacker, a lawyer for the bank, told the judge the concern is that the ruling could be used in other cases against the bank. Hacker agreed to consult with his client and let the judge know by day’s end about whether the bank will still honor the settlement if the judge refuses to dismiss the case entirely, including his March ruling.

A coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit yesterday against the U.S. Education Department and Secretary Betsy DeVos for not enforcing an Obama-era rule intended to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit schools, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In June, DeVos suspended the so-called “gainful employment” rules before they took effect. If enacted they would have cut off federal funding for schools where students leave with high debt and end up in jobs with low salaries. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., calls DeVos’s suspension of those rules “unlawful” and accuses her of trying to “run out the clock” through a series of delays until she can implement new regulation. In July, the same group of attorneys general sued DeVos over the rollback of another Obama regulation that empowered students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges to apply for loan forgiveness.

Federal and state authorities are cracking down on multiple purveyors of so-called “student loan debt relief,” alleging that the companies took in more than $95 million in illegal up-front fees from American consumers in exchange for little or no help, ABC News reported on Friday. The actions, announced on Friday as “Operation Game of Loans” by the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 11 states and the District of Columbia, include five new cases, one new judgment in favor of the FTC and a preliminary injunction entered in a case filed earlier this year. Officials say that the debt relief businesses employed a variety of deceptions, including pretending to be affiliated with a federal debt relief program or a loan servicer, falsely promising to reduce or forgive debt and charging illegal upfront fees. Some of the businesses would invoke real federal debt relief programs — but fail to mention that these programs are free to apply for, narrowly designed and most consumers do not qualify. States involved in the crackdown were Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, along with the District of Columbia, but the companies operated in other states as well.