Banks call rejection of class-action rule a win for consumers
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress handed Wall Street banks a big victory Tuesday by effectively killing off a politically popular rule that would have allowed consumers to band together to sue their banks.
The 51-50 vote in the Senate, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the deciding vote, means bank customers will still be subject to what are known as mandatory arbitration clauses. These clauses are buried in the fine print of nearly every checking account, credit card, payday loan, auto loan or other financial services contract and require customers to use arbitration to resolve any dispute with their banks. They effectively waive the customers’ right to sue.
The banking industry lobbied hard to roll back a proposed regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have largely restricted mandatory arbitration clauses by 2019. Consumers would have been allowed to sue their bank as a group in a class-action lawsuit. Individual consumers with individual complaints would still have to use arbitration under the rules.
Trump is expected to sign the Senate resolution into law, overturning yet another initiative enacted under President Barack Obama’s administration.
The overturn marks a significant victory for Wall
Street. After the financial crisis, Congress and the Obama administration put substantial new regulations on how banks operated and fined them tens of billions of dollars for the damage they caused to the housing market. But since Trump’s victory last year, banking lobbyists have felt emboldened to get some of the rules repealed or replaced altogether. High on the list was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s arbitration rules.
“[The] vote is a giant setback for every consumer in this country. Wall Street won and ordinary people lost. This vote means the courtroom doors will remain closed for groups of people seeking justice and relief when they are wronged by a company,” said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, who was appointed by Obama, in a statement.
The big banks and their lobbyist groups are calling this a victory for U.S. consumers, saying that arbitration is faster and the rules would have been an economic stimulus package for classaction trial lawyers. They also cite statistics from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s own 2015 study that show that the average award from a class-action lawsuit is roughly $32 while an award from arbitration is $5,389.
But reality is more complicated.
The reason why the award for most class-action suits is small is because people don’t typically sue individually his or her bank over a small sum of money, such as an overdraft charge or account service fee, because it’s not worth the financial effort to recover a $10, $25, or $35 fee. Arbitration cases are less common and usually involve more substantial disputes, hence the larger awards. And the majority of consumers resolve their dispute with their banks in person, typically at a branch or over the phone.