The Seven Minute Rule

Apr 9, 2019

The government protects us from some dangerous products, but not from others that, over time, ruin countless lives. Michael has started a Go Fund Me campaign to help Katie finally be free of her student loan burden. If you would like to contribute, visit Katie's Go Fund Me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I live in Berkeley California it's a peaceful place for an American city in 20 years I've never so much as noticed the police station never occurred to me that I even needed to know where it was but now here I am inside the place surrounded by cinder block walls and pictures of legendary police officers and across the table from me there's a living legend officer Joe LeDoux

ooh so I'm going to tell you what happened to me okay and why I'm here so beginning of last year we started to get calls at eight in the morning from Citigroup big bank and you're like I was getting the kids out the door for breakfast in the phone ring and this happened ten times out 20 times 30 times 50 times I mean it was just like harassment and they said I owed the money and it was absolutely bizarre because I didn't end there any any business with Citigroup I mean

credit cards no nothing but they said we had like 15 thousand dollars of outstanding loans on I just want to say that again so you hear it Citigroup said I owed them $15,000 and so finally I said look quick calling us you just drive me as crazy in the mornings and whatever reason they just stopped calling okay the next thing that happens is I get a note from American Express saying my credit score has collapsed because I have welshed on a debt to Citigroup so American Express call me and says

we're going to put a limit on your account because your FICO score is declined and I call them I said well how does this happen how do you know this is all well credit aggregator name Experian has sent us a report saying you've got some bad debts I didn't even know what Experian was or what it did is it turns out there are a bunch of companies that make their money by gathering up whatever anyone bank or credit card company has to say about you and then spreading the word to the others

so that if One Bank thinks you owe them money all the others see you as a problem Experian is one of those companies and I'd become one of those problems someone claiming to be me open it a credit card account with Citibank in Sioux Falls South Dakota and he gave it as his address Street in Miami but it's a street that doesn't even exist credit limit was

15,000 somehow he managed to borrow sixteen thousand four hundred and six dollars and repaint none of it sixteen thousand four hundred and six dollars okay when I called Experian to say how come you have this on my credit report they said well we can't do anything about it just Citigroup said you owe them this money so I call Citigroup and Citigroup said they didn't know who I was and at no record of my social security number I mean it was just a mass I was I was in stuck in on hold for hours and they gave me no joy I mean no joy at

all finally experience tells me that I need to file an identity theft complaint with the FTC the Federal Trade Commission which I did and they said I had to go come to the police station and file a report for them to take seriously my claim that my identity has been stolen so to summarize myself just there a big New York Bank hands 15 16 Grand to someone pretending to be me Michael Lewis then some credit

see broadcast a total lie about my behavior and now I need to drive down to my local police station and bother a local cop so that's why I'm here I want to file a police report for identity theft and I want to ask you a couple questions about it before I do it the first is how often do you all have people filing identity theft reports with the police very frequently oh so it's not this is not weird not completely uncommon no no but that isn't the question I most wanted an answer to

I've been stewing on another question for so long it's almost hard to put it into words I mean just as a law enforcement officer does it not strike you as strange that I've never had anything to do with either one of these parties and they wrote me into this and and oh it's my problem all of a sudden it seems to me that Citigroup should be filing some sort of complaint with the police not me and that I shouldn't have to deal with this at all that it's very odd that it's framed this way that whole notion of identity theft

no once I'm still me for the first time officer ladoo is looking at me a little dubiously like I'm crossing some wine like I'm going to start asking him for his opinions about animal rights or about the local Native American burial ground that somehow wound up under the parking lot of a fish restaurant cops don't control the rules of the game they just enforce them The Advisory idea that I should have to spend a minute having to deal with this seems just a little odd I mean if you take it out of the financial sector and you say I managed

persuade Zoe that I'm Audrey and I get her lend me ten Grand Audrey's my producer on this episode and Zoe is my associate producer they're here at the station with me recording just standing there in their headphones expressionless dead-eyed is always not going to have any ability to disrupt my life or get me in I mean it's an odd thing that the financial system has now put this sort of strain on police resources

seems to me so let me put it as a question if people are coming in filings reports is taking your time and all the rest has ever struck you that it seemed a little crazy to have the police in the middle of this to answer it it's interesting in the fact that it's a different type of victimization right I don't like to think of myself as a victim but if you want me to be one well I don't want you to be but it turns out I have to be the victim at least if I want him to file a report if I'm not a victim that I'm to blame for whatever a fake Michael Lewis has been doing at his fake address

here's the funny thing I feel victimized not by whoever that guy dude was in Miami but by Citigroup like they present themselves as someone who has been victimized by essentially my inability to prevent anybody from stealing my identity but really if they'd never not done the Dopey thing in the first place we wouldn't even be here and that's the thing that kind of gets under my skin is that the financial sector has figured out a way to shift the burden of this problem on two people who have nothing to do with the problem let me get you a casing right

dispatch 130 so I've never had a case number can you put me on the board and generate numbers for by Thirty point five to nineteen you know what all is numbers mean oh yeah chocolate really has just like another language

six zero one four six six zero one four Stick never thank you I feel like I exist again so I'm gonna give you a business card with the case number and I'm also going to give you a victim of identity theft pamphlet I already said this but I'm the real Michael Lewis and this is against the rules a show about the decline of the human referee in American life and what that's doing to our idea of fairness

here are the two most dangerous words in the English language Consumer Finance

the phrase now gets tossed around as if it's a natural part of human existence like it's been around forever but the first national credit cards didn't exist until Bank of America created them in the late 1960s and it wasn't until the mid-1970s that Citigroup figured a way around the user we laws laws that have existed since the first Babylonian Dynasty that put limits on how much interest A lender could charge a borrower in the mid-70s the Supreme Court ruled that the laws that applied to lenders where the

eight laws where the lender was based as opposed to where the loan occurred in a desperate move to revive its economy South Dakota got rid of the Usery laws in 1979 which is why the Citigroup credit card I never applied for was issued from Sioux Falls South Dakota the original Citigroup credit card agreement back in the 1970s ran a page and a half the one I never signed was more than 30 pages of tiny print and as you no doubt

already know it's a Minefield of complicated fees and penalties

but it's not just credit cards now it's all the Wall Street Banks the payday lender is the subprime mortgage lender is the car loan Originators the student loan servicers and the vast shadowy network of companies supposedly keeping track of the credit worthiness of ordinary Americans

This is where trust in institutions has taken the biggest hit

when money people figured out how to inflict pain and suffering even on middle class white people without any consequence for themselves how do they do this that's easy Consumer Finance has had an incredible gift for remaining unreferenced and the absence of a ref is what's allowed them to screw up the lives of millions and millions of Ordinary People

like super emotional today so if I cry easily meet Katie Highland of New Rochelle New York public school teacher mother of two small children don't like related to this to the this to which she refers is Consumer Finance some old student loans

student loans started flowering in the 1980s after the Boom in credit cards and the effect of death of usury laws just now about 44 million Americans owe a total of 1.5 trillion dollars in student debt more than 4 million of those Americans most of them young people are already in default some large number of the rest are heading towards it and if you think they're just a bunch of deadbeats we'll just hold that thought

do you want to introduce yourself that's Audrey my producer act like a big girl

and what's your name Jackson what do you usually do when you come home um just go on a couch but if I feel very sleepy I'll just fall asleep but if we do fall you really wake up so fast oh yeah up his we can't fall asleep until and and Mommy can't start a work at night and to like nine what did she do at night what type of work she just goes on a computer and maybe

exams emails or and and actually sends what she does to work on her computer the school so we're school can be running very good that's Jackson Katie son Katie teaches reading and writing to eighth graders in the Bronx and works with kids who struggle in school years ago Katie got a Bachelor's degree in English and then a master's in secondary education so the loans I took out since day one I

graduated high school in 2001 and I had to take loans out immediately my mom raised three kids by herself so we didn't have anything so it was always understood that I was going to have student loans and I was going to have to pay them back and so from day one that's what I did do you remember if you could take yourself back to that time like how did you think it was gonna go yeah like in the few like being there and then thinking about the future yeah I just thought like these are all adults they have my best interest at heart and the

that are doing these things who are associated with colleges and financial institutions like they're going to tell me the thing that I'm supposed to do and then when it comes time to pay it back I'm going to have a job and I'm going to have plenty of money and it's going to be easy and you know it was just something like oh yeah everyone's student loans it's annoying but it's doable sort of thing

she doesn't recall anyone ever trying to explain to her how her loans worked she just remembers the financial advisor at her College giving her some papers to sign and that was that in the end to pay for college and grad school she took out several loans totaling $77,000 the loans came from the US Department of Education but the government farmed out the management of its student loans to the private sector the Consumer Finance industry

the company advising her is called navient when Katie has problems or questions she needs to call navient I realized that the amount of money that they expected me to pay every month wasn't going to be possible that was when I first started like calling them and saying listen how do I get my payment slower what do I do you know I'm a teacher I only make such and such amount of money and you know I don't really know how you guys expect me to pay

it's back with what I'm making and every time I called it was a forbearance or deferment or you know oh yeah this is great like you don't have to make payments for this amount of time and sort of kept guiding me in that direction in 2007 the United States Congress created the Public service loan forgiveness program for people who wanted to go into public service so they can afford to do it police officers firefighters soldiers teachers people who did those sort of job

jobs for 10 years and made 120 student loan payments on time could walk away from the rest of what they'd borrowed it was just the sort of thing that a company like navient might alert borrowers to but they didn't tell Katie Katie heard about it on her own in 2014 from a fellow teacher I kind of felt relief when I first found out about this one particular program because I was like great like I'm a big believer of like the hard stuff will pass

and so for me that's what this was it was like okay this is gonna suck like you're not going to be able to go away you're not going to be able to have birthday parties for your kids or do this or do that but in 10 years if you're in this plan like it'll be worth it at the end because it will be gone and then you can just like really put your time and your money into you know the things that you want to do for your family and your kids and so she called navient again

that's where the trouble really began when she called the company that was paid to help her understand her situation to ask them for help I was getting all the paperwork filled out for the Public service loan forgiveness and I remember go like I have going back and forth like faxing and they're like oh no the date is wrong you have to fill it out again and I would fax it again and oh no this was in a different format you have to fax it again it was the same way I felt when I was trying to get experience or Citigroup or whoever to explain what they've done to my credit the whole news

the phony thank you for your patience the Deep mystery of the exact location of the person who finally comes on the other end of the line the total inability of anyone to solve anything and they said that I you know no one was eligible until 2017 because at that point it would have been 10 years from the when the program started by 2017 she'd have spent 10 years as a teacher and made 120 on-time payments what remained of her loans would then be entitled

entirely forgiven and I said to my mom said this is going to be amazing what a relief like if this happens like I'll be able to save and maybe one day buy a house or whatever and I remember calling back in the end of 2016 to make sure that things were ready for the beginning of 2017 and them telling me that no you're not eligible you were never eligible and basically if you want to become eligible you have to consolidate your loans and you

to start from scratch starting now at 10 years and I was like whoa wait a minute Katie Highland ask navient to go back and listen to phone records of all her previous calls all those conversations about faxing and paperwork and waiting until 2017 they said that they did and they said and then they called me back and said we never heard any instances on the phone records of you asking anything about Public service loan forgiveness and I was like well that's a

outright lie

oh that familiar feeling

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if you want to track Katie Highlands misery to its source you need to travel to Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania or at least call someone who knows the place it's the type of place that you grow up in and your whole family is there and chances are you settle down and you stay there for the rest of your life Lynn cebulski grew up in Wilkes-Barre for employment it is an economically depressed area and so employers like navient major employers are the area

are really important in terms of upholding the local economy Lynn's been in the student loan industry for 15 years until last year she worked in the navient call center in Wilkes-Barre the place Katie Highland called for help to take advantage of the program Congress had created for people like her the program to make the student debt of public servants bearable your team is handling calls that are coming in from people who have student loans that they're dealing with correct and so what were the

pressures on you that that bothered you the biggest pressure that was on me was the 7-minute rule and that was representatives were told to keep their phone calls to no more than seven minutes also within those requirements were that you validate the caller's identity that you validate their contact information that you read a script approving you know use of their their telephone and their text messaging and so by the time you know you

I mentioned auto-debit you had to mention the company website and all of this eats away at the seven minutes that you're given it's called running out the clock that you might basketball it used to be known as the Four Corners off a right right for they put it before they put in the shot clock so so so what what what and if you win over 7 minutes what would happen here I should say for the record that a navient representative wrote to us the company said that quote while navient like other customers

service oriented companies measures call times we do not set any time limits for calls Lynn cebulski got a different message at her call center the Reps were put in a position where they couldn't give the borrower's the information that really needed to be given and so what some of the representatives started doing we're looking for ways to you know get their calls under some of the representatives would pretend that the call had disconnected they

which you know accidentally on purpose hang up on a borrower because that bar were needed to talk about an income-based repayment option and it's a long application and the borrower has too many questions and somebody's looking at their watch going hey I got to keep this under seven minutes or you know the kids aren't going to have dinner Lynn cebulski was never on the phone with Katie Highland at least not that we know of but she knows pretty well would happen to her navient was meant to be advising people with student loans on behalf of the Department of Education but the

Department of Education pays navient a fee for every account they manage the less time they spend on each account the less it costs them to manage that account the 7-minute rule is there just to maximize profit per customer we could see throughout the day how far we were out of standard as what it would be called so for example I had a display on my computer that would show me at any given moment if I was like red yellow or green in terms of you know how my numbers were holding up

and then if you kept your phone calls to 7 minutes or under you got a Bonus and that could be a few hundred dollars in an economically depressed area that's the difference between you know paying your groceries or your car payment or not you got that right the customer service reps for student loans have their own consumer financial problems which they can only solve if they ignore yours you know there's this thing called empathy you know if you're calling me because you're in distress because your finances are a mess

yes and you need help and you're talking to somebody who is dependent on making this call a seven-minute thing because their finances are not that great and they're not in a position you know to get something better than you know it feels doubly deceptive because you know that you're kind of in the same shoes here's the reality of Consumer Finance a town of people highly dependent on a student loan servicing firm

is being put to work finding ways to screw the equally desperate people who've taken out the loans to do things like make it extremely difficult for a teacher to opt into the program Congress had created specifically to reward people like her but if navient allowed Katie Highland enter the program her account would be taken away from navient and navient would lose Revenue

Katie Highland wasn't Naviance client she was its crop

the CEO of navient is named Jack raimondi in 2017 he was paid six and a half million dollars we asked to interview him or some spokesperson in abyan but they didn't want to talk but let's leave that to one side for a moment let's consider this business of student loan servicing the behavior it encourages the spirit in which it operates

navient isn't some little pissant fly-by-night company it's listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange has a market cap of nearly three billion dollars its services 300 billion dollars in student loans it's the heart of Consumer Finance

so a manager came over me while I was on the phone discussing an income-based repayment plan with a borrower and they said don't give anybody timeframes try to avoid discussing that but if anybody asks you out right tell them it's two weeks you are obviously bothered you and your an empathetic individual was there any but were there any people you were working with who sort of embrace the navient way and we're like seeing if they could break speed records with their calls yes there's always that person

there I just want to assume it was your like I imagine like it young guys hey didn't I literally sat next to that guy and you know the problem was you know the lower though his calls became he was getting training opportunities he was being promoted so basically the worst performers in terms of getting the borrower's the information they need those are the people who then move up the ladder he's a superstar man he's destined for its the CEO Suite I was being told to like talk to him and try and pick up some tips

did you did you ever try to listen to what he was doing to figure out how on Earth he was doing that oh yeah the the easiest way to get somebody off the phone is to give them a temporary solution and send them paperwork to look at later so you know so one of the issues around forbearances that you know interest continues to collect on balances and it's not always a good financial decision for borrowers to put their loans in but it's one of the only

options that can be processed right over the phone that's exactly what navient did with Katie Highland they encouraged her to accept forbearance for years the word sounds so reassuring almost like forgiveness actually all I did was compound the amount she owed for a loan that was originally $77,000 she'd wind up repaying more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and in the bargain they totally screwed up her ability to get out from under her alone all together I like I

said I can usually put in the Blood Sweat and the tears if I know the thing is temporary and then it's leading to something that is going to be better that was when it became like really glaringly real and then sort of panicking because there was nothing I could do it's amazing how much pain you can create inside of 7 minutes I don't think people have any real idea how dangerous it would be to shop for ordinary

consumer goods if there weren't a referee between you and the people who sell you things but there is a referee at least in the United States it's called the consumer product safety commission check out its website you'll find hundreds of products that it's ordered pulled off the shelves before they kill or maim consumers

just recently they forced the recall of 32,000 high chairs prone to detaching from their bases and launching the babies inside they also save you from wireless speakers that catch fire flashlights that explode shower doors it fall in on you when your buck naked and blinded by soap and stairmasters who steps accelerate incredibly quickly all by themselves

as I speak the commission is just removed from the market 1500 Cracker Barrel Old Country Store decorative pineapples laceration risk you probably didn't know that but now that you do it's highly unlikely that you think why is the government acting as this referee to protect me from being impaled by a fruit more likely you're thinking thank God they recall the decorative pineapples before I bought mine

when you take out a student loan or any kind of loan you're buying a product a curious sort of product this product is far more likely to kill you than any exploding flashlight if you doubt that just spend some time in the many student loan chat rooms devoted to suicide

most Consumer Financial products are more complicated than high chairs or decorative pineapples much more likely to have fatal flaws that no one but an expert can spot

plus they come with a servicer you know nothing about the human beings who will handle your loan until you pay it off that guy who gets promoted for getting you off the phone inside of seven minutes without helping you he's part of the product you bought and tied yourself to for years and he to presents a laceration risk so why wouldn't there be a referee for all this a neutral party whose job it is to spot dangerous Financial products and pull them from the market before they do more harm

oh wait that's not an original thought someone's already had it I'm Elizabeth Warren I am the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts before she was Elizabeth Warren she was Professor Elizabeth Warren at Harvard specializing in bankruptcy law and why middle class people go broke in so it's the early 2000s and I'm trying to figure out how do you fix this problem

problem and you're going to laugh I'm thinking about toasters you can't buy a toaster anywhere in America that has a one in five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house we have a consumer product safety commission that just says no sorry you don't get to put those things on the market actually toasters do burst into flames back in 2011 Hamilton Beach was forced to recall 300,000 of its classic Chrome to slicer

because breakfast can kill you we do not require people to have engineering degrees to buy toasters they don't have to look at wiring diagrams and know what weight wiring you used and whether it has appropriate insulation we don't ask any of those questions we just say you know there's like some minimum safety here somebody buys a toaster it better be able to toast and it can't burst into flames and I thought about it in terms of wait a minute why is that so on toasters

and it's not so on mortgages it's so at what moment do you become so alive do these problems that all of a sudden the world's getting very complicated for the financial consumer at his expense that you become so alive to this that your move to write about it so you gotta watch what's happening is more lenders now are starting to move into this space of and here's the key building a profit model based on tricking people on cheating people

so that becomes the business model the business model is teaser rates with subprime mortgages double cycle billing with credit cards interest rates that leap from 30 to 200 percent on payday loans if you're late with a single payment again if you're an American adult or maybe even a child you know what I'm talking about Elizabeth Warren wanted to create a government agency to referee all that when you first float this idea how is it greeted

okay so when I first float this I mean come on this is the early 2000s and I'm talking about a new government agency oh just what everybody's looking for right does anybody take an interest in it at a healthy sort of constructive interest in it and people think you're a crackpot well I hope nobody thought it was a crackpot I look far too serious for that and I you know I wear glasses I mean come on I could be a crackpot Elizabeth Warren then does what every crackpot Professor does she writes an

your article it's published the summer of 2007 in the journal democracy title unsafe at any rate you proposed creating this new Empire everybody kind of thanks a lot will never happen and then all of a sudden the world shapes itself in a way that it sees oh my God we need this umpire right the world gets on board then gets on board for a short trip anyway the 2008 financial crisis has its roots in Consumer Finance

the entire nation got so pissed off at Wall Street That Wall Street lost control of the political process in 2010 Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau they designed the agency so that Congress wouldn't have Direct Control of its budget because everyone suspected that the finance industry might one day try to kill the new referee

in 2013 Elizabeth Warren became a United States Senator but that wasn't enough to stop what eventually happened

when you hear the phrase government agency what do you think what picture forms in your mind probably have some nondescript concrete building with small windows and gray men and women walking in just after 9:00 and walking out just before five doing as little as possible and that unwillingly vast sums of money have been spent to keep that picture in your mind a lot of it by companies engaged in Consumer Finance

my name is Seth rapmon I used to work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Seth fraud man got to know the Consumer Finance industrial complex in the early 2000s when he went to work for a former Marine who had been elected to congress he was instantly inundated with stories of American soldiers being deceived and abused by Financial firms there were literally service members who were flying back from Iraq and Afghanistan

Stan because their Banks were illegally foreclosing on their houses while they were deployed and they would spend like every waking moment when they weren't down range with their troops battling with Wells Fargo or Bank of America or one of these other companies and literally while they were getting shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan their spouses and kids were at home dealing with kind of foreclosure notices and Banks it turns out that the banks were just being Odie

they were breaking the law so there's actually a statute called the servicemembers Civil Relief act which has been in place in some form or another I believe since like the Civil War and it has like a host of different protections but one of those essentially dramatically limited the way in which a service member who was on active duty could get their house foreclosed on the banks just hope the soldiers didn't know about the statute and made it hard for them to take advantage of it sound familiar

earlier there was really nowhere these soldiers could turn for help except to individual members of Congress until the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau get started Seth frogmen joins up right away specifically to help members of the military

its first five years the bureau handed back nearly 12 billion dollars to people who've been ripped off by consumer finance companies

it created a new disincentive for companies that made money by ripping people off because it's sued the asses off those companies

a couple of years in Seth move from working with veterans to working with students were you shocked when you collided with the student loan situation just how bad it was yes literally one of the hardest part about the job was convincing people it was actually as bad as it is without seeming like a crazy person with their hair on fire all the time right which I'm probably not good at one of the things that led his hair on fire was the behavior of

loan servicers the Naviance of the world

Seth student loan unit looked into a bunch of complaints it found that loan servicers were preventing School teachers cops and firefighters from getting into the loan forgiveness program the one Congress had created for them back in 2007 Seth found out about the 7-minute rule they have essentially every incentive under the book to ensure that the people on their phones are not doing as good of a job as possible but getting off the phone as quick as possible

Seth went to his boss Richard cordray who was head of the bureau together they decided to file a massive lawsuit against Navien which of course alarm the entire Consumer Finance industry I mean if this new agency was actually going to stop consumers from being ripped off where would it leave the companies that made money from it so then what happens then essentially with a flip of a switch director cordray leaves the bureau the bureau is given

an acting director who also has a full-time job as the head of the Office of Management and budget right so Mick Mulvaney Mick Mulvaney the structure of the cfpb is is just fundamentally flawed on one hand people call it independent but the real bottom line is it's simply unaccountable and that's wrong that's Mick Mulvaney talking to Fox News is Lou Dobbs at the end of November 2017 we were slated to put out our annual report documenting

how College debit cards had a particular risk for consumers despite protections that should be in place essentially when the new leadership of the bureau came in we were told that we would put that report in in a drawer that was no longer our job did you did you have the option of is ignoring that know what would happen if you did I assume I would end up where I am here just a lot of earlier in the process in the process where Seth is as you're probably

Ali guessing is out of a job he left Donald Trump cfpb maybe I shouldn't ask him to speculate about what's going on now with his former employer but I can't help myself what's going through the mind of Mick Mulvaney when he says you put to ask you to put that report in the drawer so I don't know I don't want to give any legitimacy to the argument because it doesn't fucking matter write it like the only thing that matters is there's someone on a college campus right now who has

debit card that a bank has negotiated with his school he thought it gave that some legitimacy he took out that card and he now has hundreds of dollars of overdraft fees and though he's pretty much screwed for a remainder of his life because of the work that we weren't allowed to do that was not an attempt to like make me or us seem grandiose that's just that's just how it works

all right so I'm standing in front of a building that used to have a big sign on it and the sign said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

one of the first things Mick Mulvaney did as acting head of the cfpb was to change the acronym to be cfp so to put the word Bureau first instead of consumer and 1970's brutalist architecture it looks like it was designed to maximize the number of Ledges people would jump off after they had a financial reversal anyway they used to be a sign here until just a couple of weeks ago and it was very proudly saying what it was

well two weeks ago they took down the sign I'm staring right here at what is I mean it's just a cinderblock wall Banks found out about the name change from cfpb to be cfp just that could cost them up to three hundred million dollars to update all their databases informs the agency itself was spending Millions to change its signage and branding all just to make the name sound less inviting to the consumers it's meant to serve

this is just a federal building the streets you know pirate is speak into my iPhone that would be against the law well I don't know that I can't say that exactly

do whatever you want to do or out here well you know

I don't I just you can go in the street but you know you I don't think you can do that here

the new director of the cfpb or whatever you call it finally gave up trying to Rebrand the place still this is the way a referee dies not with a bang but a distraction this massive explosion in the Public Square gets muffled a million tragedies silently unfold in the lives of ordinary people who fought they were the customers and found out they were just the crop

I have so here my original loan amount was 77549 I have forty six thousand five hundred sixty one left to pay off I've paid back fifty three thousand eight hundred and ninety that's a lot of money

Katie Highland still waiting she also joined other teachers in a lawsuit against Navien there was a US Government audit of loan services like Navien it found that 30,000 qualified people teachers firefighters soldiers had applied to the loan forgiveness program only 96 got their loans forgiven 96

the student loan servicers found tricks to deny all the rest and that doesn't even count the greater number of people like Katie Highland who never got to submit an application in the first place like literally I don't know if you want to put like my teeth like from grinding and anxiety like I have had one two three four five teeth had to come out which is what I'm dealing with like currently at the moment which is like making me very upset cause I can't smile anymore and stuff and dental insurance doesn't cover implants

and so like I have lost like all these teeth and I'm 35 and it's like it's like crazy but it's like the stress is constant if a toaster had blown up and maimed a mother of two you'd say God that's awful get that toaster off the market and get her some compensation

but a Consumer Finance Company steals the happiness from her life and we're all half inclined to think oh it's her problem she borrowed the money dug her own grave

why is that I don't see any pay off and it just keeps getting harder and harder and that's soul-crushing and it's hard also with like little kids too

be happy and everything's okay and you know and you know to encourage them to do things and and follow their dreams and I my mom got mad at me the other day because my daughter who you met should I want to be a teacher and it's like no you don't you never ever want to be a teacher and my mom was like 80 she's bored pretty much where I am well I won't make you look at these anymore

a might be actually kind of painful for her because all of this counts with a bill and getting something changed to another thing that's the same but changing to it I love you it feel well it does feel kind of painful right Mommy a lot of the papers yet there it's a lot of paperwork it's a lot of and a lot of pain yeah well for doing

uh-huh yeah so why are we asking what we move on and that's pretty much what I did is just move on you're very thoughtful well it is very good to be thoughtful for everybody but the person who's the most best person on earth is this lady right here

Jackson I'm so in love with you so much of life is just dumb luck consumer finance companies got lucky if the student loan servicing industry had somehow been invented in the early 19th century in the late 19th century or even the mid-twentieth some ref would have probably been put in place but right now rafts are hard to create

so the head of navient makes 6 million dollars a year while Katie Highlands teeth fall out one by one

I've never had a consumer loan I've always paid my Amex bill on time and always pay cash for everything else which is to say I've never been at the mercy of the Consumer Finance industry the next aspect is to go back and resolve the issue that's on your credit report which is more time at all three credit bureaus yes they don't share and yet there I was not quite able to get away from it because even when you think you're free and clear of Consumer Finance it can pull you into its fucked-up Little World in which they create problems and then make them your

most you and officer Jolla do Berkeley Police right we want you to focus on now certainly going forward is some of the crime prevention techniques which is this right here it's got your Social Security number on it so when you're done with it should be shredded not just tossed in the trash because when we have people going through the trash and they see this they go Wow Let's go through my trash people do it do they absolutely never seen any my garbage cans outside my house I stare at it all the time it's a no way to raise goes out of that trash truck and somebody walking down the street and they go oh here we go we got Michael and Lewis and we got your

Social Security number and sorry to have taken up so much of your time this is great I gather up the mess of papers the letters from MX saying my credit rating is shot the credit reports from Experian the FTC pamphlet on all the things I need to do to fix this problem that a Wall Street Bank created all by itself some give you that you want two copies a single envelope falls out of the pile so this is I brought this in and I haven't opened it it's from Citigroup Citigroup to whom I have

early still owe $16,000 in their mind and I didn't I had no open it because you know it's a it's an offer for a credit card yep you're great you're great right so do you want to Citigroup credit card me I'm good appreciate it because one day anybody all right

I'm Michael Lewis thanks again for listening to against the rules against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the show is produced by Audrey dilling and Catherine Jared oh with research assistance from Zoe Oliver gray and Beth Johnson our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobel is our executive producer our theme was composed by Nick brittle with additional scoring by Seth Samuel mastering by Jason

Braille

our show was recorded at Northgate studios in Berkeley by Topher roof special thanks to our Founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell