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A temporary U.S. ban on evictions in parts of the country hit hard by the pandemic can remain in place, a federal judge in Washington ruled, a victory for the Biden administration’s efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected a plea by landlord groups to block the new eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even as she voiced concerns over the legality of the policy. The decision means the ban, set to last until Oct. 3, can stay in place for now, though it will face further court challenges from landlords. Friedrich, a critic of the moratorium, wrote that she was forced to keep the freeze in place because of a ruling by the U.S. appeals court in Washington that allowed a previous nationwide version of the policy to stand. “Throughout the pandemic, preventing evictions and keeping people in their homes has been a proven way of slowing the spread of Covid-19,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “We are pleased that the district court left the moratorium in place, though we are aware that further proceedings in this case are likely.” Psaki also urged state and local officials to move faster in distributing almost $47 billion in emergency rental assistance as the legal wrangling over the moratorium continues. Just 12% of the first $25 billion Congress allocated had made its way to eligible households in the first half of the year, Treasury Department data show, though the pace has been accelerating, with more than $1.5 billion doled out in June alone. While she believes the moratorium is legally dubious, she wrote, “the court’s hands are tied.”

A recent report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that many servicers were initially overwhelmed as the pandemic resulted in millions of people losing their jobs, the Washington Post reported. For example, one large servicer received about 650,000 inquiries to its call center in February 2021. The number increased to 750,000 in March and then dropped to 625,000 in April. The uptick in March tracked the expiration of forbearances for borrowers who enrolled at the beginning of the pandemic and who were probably calling to discuss additional relief, the CFPB said. As of July, more than 1.8 million borrowers were enrolled in active forbearance plans, the CFPB said. The agency has warned mortgage servicers to take proactive steps to assist borrowers, including dedicating resources and staffers to stay in contact with borrowers to ultimately reduce foreclosures and foreclosure-related costs. The CFPB said about 569,000 borrowers are in the early stages of delinquency but aren’t participating in a forbearance plan. “The overall message is that the bureau will be watching closely this fall to see how servicers handle the wave of forbearance exits and take appropriate action as needed,” said Mark McArdle, the CFPB’s assistant director for mortgage markets. Some homeowners will not be able to resume making payments on their mortgages, and that means some foreclosures are unavoidable. But the CFPB is doing what should have been done during the housing crisis. The agency is holding mortgage servicers accountable if they don’t do enough to help people avoid losing their homes.

More than seven months after it was launched, the biggest rental assistance program in U.S. history has delivered just a fraction of the promised aid to tenants and landlords struggling with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since last December, Congress has appropriated a total of $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their rent. As of June 30, just $3 billion had been distributed, though a senior official said the Biden administration hoped at least another $2 billion had been distributed in July. While the program is overseen by the Treasury, it relies on a patchwork of more than 450 state, county and municipal governments and charitable organizations to distribute aid. The result: months of delays as local governments built new programs from scratch, hired staff and crafted rules for how the money should be distributed, then struggled to process a deluge of applications.

The U.S. Justice Department yesterday threw its weight behind a proposed rule change that would require banks and other debit card issuers to provide multiple network options to merchants to route online purchases, Reuters reported. The move, made in a comment letter filed to the Federal Reserve by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, underlines the Biden's administration’s renewed efforts to bolster the government's antitrust efforts. "We commend the Board for its efforts to promote competition in this important part of the debit card industry," said Richard Powers, acting assistant attorney general for the antitrust division. "There is limited competition to process online and other card-not-present debit transactions — which in 2019 accounted for over $1 trillion in transaction value." In July, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing government agencies to crack down on anticompetitive behavior across a range of industries, including banking.

Prices for U.S. consumers rose last month but at the slowest pace since February, a sign that Americans may gain some relief after four months of sharp increases that have imposed a financial burden on the nation’s households, the Associated Press reported. Wednesday’s report from the Labor Department showed that consumer prices jumped 0.5% from June to July, down from the previous monthly increase of 0.9%. They have increased a substantial 5.4%, though, compared with a year earlier. Excluding volatile energy and food prices, so-called core inflation rose 4.3% in the past year, down slightly from 4.5% in June — the fastest pace since 1991. Americans continue to face higher costs, with the year-over-year inflation rate matching June’s increase as the largest annual jump since 2008. At the same time, some recent drivers of the inflation surge slowed last month. The price of used cars, which had soared over the past three months, ticked up just 0.2% in July. Airline fares, which had been spiking, actually declined 0.1% in July.

A provision in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code that makes it extremely difficult to discharge student loan debt needs to go, the American Bar Association signaled Tuesday, Reuters reported. The ABA’s House of Delegates, which sets policy for the organization, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling on the national lawyer group to lobby Congress to remove the “undue hardship” standard from the bankruptcy code and treat educational debt the same as other forms of unsecured debt. Currently, the undue hardship standard is so hard to meet in court that most borrowers struggling with educational debt don’t even try, said Aaron Sohaski, director of student debt and financial wellness in the ABA’s Young Lawyers Division. “While I recognize that is not impossible to discharge student debt in bankruptcy, it remains an unnecessary challenge on lawyers shouldering high debt loads,” he said. The House of Delegates approved the resolution in a vote of 251 to 71 during the final day of the ABA’s annual meeting, and no one spoke in opposition. It’s the second time this year that the ABA has taken a position on student debt. In February, the House of Delegates passed a resolution backing student loan forgiveness and measures that would make it easier for student loan borrowers to make their monthly payments. Law school graduates leave with an average $138,500 in educational loan debt, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Education. Chris Jennison, the immediate past speaker of the ABA’s Young Lawyers Division, on Tuesday cited the results of a 2020 survey of ABA members early in their legal careers in which a quarter of the respondents said they have education debt loads of $200,000 or more. That survey also found that many young lawyers are delaying major life decisions such as getting married or buying a home because of their student loan debt.

In its latest move to undo Trump-era policies, the Education Department said on Monday that states are free to police federal student loan servicers that run afoul of local consumer protection laws, reversing its previous legal stance, the New York Times reported. “Effective collaboration among the states and federal government is the best way to ensure that student loan borrowers get the best possible service,” Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona said in a statement announcing the change. The federal government pays seven vendors to collect payments from nearly 43 million borrowers on $1.4 trillion in federal student loans. Government auditors and other watchdogs have repeatedly criticized the companies for shoddy practices and mistakes that they say have harmed struggling borrowers and raised the repayment costs for many people. Multiple state attorneys general have sued federal loan servicers over their missteps. In 2018, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Donald J. Trump, sought to block those lawsuits by arguing that only the federal government had the authority to oversee and punish its federal loan servicers. Several federal judges viewed that stance skeptically. In at least four cases, federal district or appellate courts ruled against the department and found that states retained some enforcement rights over servicers’ actions toward their state’s residents. The Education Department cited those rulings in new guidance explaining its reversal and said working collaboratively with the states instead of fighting them “could produce a more robust system of supervision and enforcement to monitor and improve performance under this far-flung system.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/business/states-federal-student-loan…