Excerpts from Elizabeth Warren essay “Unsafe at any rate,” written for Democracy journal, summer 2007:
“It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street — and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner. Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time. Why are consumers safe when they purchase tangible consumer products with cash, but when they sign up for routine financial products like mortgages and credit cards they are left at the mercy of their creditors?”
“To be sure, creating safer marketplaces is not about protecting consumers from all possible bad decisions. Instead, it is about making certain that the products themselves don’t become the source of the trouble. This means that terms hidden in the fine print or obscured with incomprehensible language, unexpected terms, reservation of all power to the seller with nothing left for the buyer, and similar tricks and traps have no place in a well-functioning market.”
“After 47 lines of text explaining how interest rates will be calculated, one prominent credit card company concludes, ‘We reserve the right to change the terms at any time for any reason.’ Evidently, all that convoluted language was there only to obscure the bottom line: The company will charge whatever it wants. In effect, such text is an effort for lenders to have it both ways. Lenders won’t be bound by any term or price that becomes inconvenient for them, but they will expect their customers to be bound by whatever terms the lenders want to enforce — and to have the courts back them up in case of dispute.”
“When markets work, they produce value for both buyers and sellers, both borrowers and lenders. But the basic premise of any free market is full information. When a lender can bury a sentence at the bottom of 47 lines of text saying it can change any term at any time for any reason, the market is broken.”
