 All right, well, let's get started, because we've got almost 90 minutes to enjoy this panel, which is a bit of a hodgepodge on everything, which is good. And mostly looking at consumers, maybe some small business discussion or not. My name's John Potter. I'm here at the University of Michigan. I'm on the law faculty, so I'm all the way across the parking lot from the Ford School here. But I'm happy to be allowed into the sunnier side of the block. I'm going to moderate our panel this afternoon. I have some of my own comments I'd like to make, but I'm going to put those at the end. And then we are going to reserve some time for group discussion. And I will apologize in advance. I have to disappear shortly after this panel is over. I'll introduce our panelists as they come up one by one. But I'll start with Patricia McCoy, who, like me, is in the horrible world of being a legal academic. And also, like me, had the misfortune of doing some practice before she went into academics. So knows dangerously enough about this area to impart her knowledge onto all of you. And she's currently, as her slides, are well-branded at Boston College. But I'll let you introduce your own topic. Oh, thank you. Can you hear me, everybody? Yes. OK, great. Turn off. I'd like to thank, first of all, John. Thank you. Michael, for organizing this incredible event, Tracy, Christy, and all of your colleagues here at the Center for organizing this really terrific conference. Our theme on this panel is emerging issues in consumer financial protection. And so I thought I would focus on mortgages. And what I'm going to focus, if you'll bear with me, is a huge looming issue in mortgage regulation that is flying under the radar for the most part. It's getting almost no press attention. It's technical. And so I'm going to try to run through the technicalities in all of seven minutes. And I've probably used one already. As we know, reckless mortgages set the 2000 financial crisis in motion. And thanks to the brilliance foresight and especially the persistence of Michael Barr and Eric Stein and a number of the other people in this room, the United States made major reforms to mortgage lending after the crisis. There were a lot of reforms, but I think the three biggest reforms were better mortgage disclosures, better mortgage servicing, although that's a work in progress, and then the ability to repay rule. I think of these. The ability to repay rule was the most important. The rule, it's what I call a sort of duh rule. It's really simple. It says a lender cannot extend mortgage credit unless it makes a reasonable determination that the borrower has the ability to repay the loan at the inception of the loan. Well, apparently that wasn't being done before 2008. The CFPB administers this rule. Under the Dodd-Frank Act, lenders who violate this rule can be sued by injured borrowers. Borrowers can also raise any violations of the rule if they are foreclosed upon as a defense. Now, in reality, the likelihood of this liability is really, really small. Nevertheless, lenders and investors seem to be terrified at the specter of this liability. In the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress provided an incentive to lenders to make even safer mortgages than ones that comply with the ability to repay rule. And if they make these safer mortgages, the mortgages are known as qualified mortgages or QMs. The quid pro quo is if a lender makes one of these qualified mortgages with safer loan terms, it will get a modicum or perhaps great protection from liability for ability to repay violations. So they'll get some protection from legal exposure. And I've listed the safer loan terms, the most important ones here. Now, it turns out that there are several ways to attain the status of a qualified mortgage. The biggest way of doing so is known as the government-sponsored enterprise patch. This applies to any loans sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. And for loans that are sold to either one of these entities to qualify for this protection from legal liability, they have to meet a number of conditions. But the three biggies are they have to be fully amortizing. In other words, every time you make a mortgage payment, it pays down the principal. It can be for no more than 30 years, and total points and fees are kept at 3%. Now, we have a little problem. This patch accounts for almost half of mortgages made in the United States today. But the patch is temporary, and it's expiring in no later than January 2021. That raises the specter of enormous potential dislocation in the mortgage markets if we don't really grapple with how to proceed. This decision is in the CFPB's corner. It has three major options, and obviously there are variations on these three themes. One is to repeal the patch. One is to renew it. And the third would be to expand the patch to all mortgages, and most importantly to mortgages sold to Wall Street, which is not true today. So it turns out that this is an even more complicated decision than it seems to be, because Fannie and Freddie almost failed in 2008. They were put into government conservatorship, and there they remain. There's an intensely partisan debate about what to do about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There have been serious moves, and there continue to be serious moves in this Congress, to end the conservatorships, privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and shift more of the financing of home mortgages to Wall Street. There is a dominant point of view in the mortgage industry that, right now, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are privileged, and they receive a competitive advantage over Wall Street in financing home mortgages. So what will happen to privatization is anybody's guess. I had a long conversation yesterday with a bunch of people who are right in the middle of this, and they said they actually don't think privatization is going to happen anytime soon, but we'll see about that. What is clear is the CFPB has no control over the privatization decision. The CFPB, whatever it has to do with the QM patch, it can't really affect this larger ongoing debate about what to do about Fannie and Freddie. So what might the CFPB do? One question is, should it just stick, and will it stick with the path of least resistance, just renew the GSE patch? There's going to be a lot of pushback from industry with the argument that the GSE patch gives Fannie and Freddie an unfair advantage over Wall Street. So there will be political pressure that could go in one of two directions. It could go in the direction of just cancelling the GSE patch, or it could go in the direction of expanding it. There is liberal concern about cancelling the GSE patch, at least in some quarters, because it helps expand mortgage credit to underserved borrowers. On the other hand, in the last crisis, loans sold to Wall Street performed the worst. They had the highest default rates, and certainly higher than Fannie and Freddie loans. Fannie and Freddie also have a better record of lending to underserved borrowers on safe, sustainable terms than Wall Street did 10 years ago. So I think this is all to say the jury is out on how this will all play out. But we need to know that this decision is pending, and it could really affect access to credit in particular. All I can say is the clock is ticking, so stay tuned. Thank you very much, Pat. Well, this is a well-captioned conference about an age of uncertainty, and I think that is the one of the few things we can generalize from current legislative action or non-action is that we are in a profound state of uncertainty, so we will have to keep watching this one. We're going to go to Lisa next, OK? Lisa Rice is the president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. You will be pleased to know that she takes an anti-discrimination position on behalf of our organization, and she's going to talk to us. Again, I'm going to let the speakers introduce their own topics. I'm going to tell you who they are, but I think they get deference on what they're talking about. Thanks so much, John. And I'm going to be focusing my comments on the legacy of discriminatory housing policies and how they're still plaguing us today and really impacting the ability of the market to provide credit access fairly to consumers. So one of the major challenges that we are still dealing with is the fallout and negative impacts of centuries of laws and policies and practices that were race-based. So these were laws and policies that were expressly race-based laws or policies that were purposefully designed to withhold and restrict opportunities from people of color in terms of accessing housing or accessing credit opportunities. These policies were specifically weaponized or targeted against African-Americans and other groups. So for example, we all are familiar with the bevy of New Deal programs, the HOLC and the FHA. The HOLC developed what were called residential security surveys and residential security maps. We know them. We commonly refer to them as redlining maps, but those redlining maps were based on residential security surveys. The HLC, the federal government, hired real estate professionals across the country to survey geographical areas, so small communities. And each of these communities were graded on a number of things, the quality of the housing stock, the age of the housing stock, the quality of the infrastructure. But every single community was also graded based on the racial composition of the neighborhood. In fact, if you look at the residential security survey, there is a fixed category for the real estate professional to indicate how many African-Americans. And I want to point that out because it is the only category that is a fixed on the residential survey. The HLC, the federal government, wanted to know how many black folk are living in this area. Now, I have not looked at every single residential security survey for every single map that was generated. There are about 200 of them. But I have looked at a lot of them. I can tell you that. I have never, ever seen a time where there was a community that had any level of African-Americans living in the community that did not receive the worst grade, the D grade or the red grade. Again, hence the term redlining. So let me say that another way. If there were 5%, if the African-American population of the neighborhood was 5%, it got coded red. That is how strong the connection between race and risk was in our housing and lending policies. And those residential security surveys and those maps were, of course, used by the FHA when the FHA generated its mortgage lending programs, which really helped fuel right the middle class and helped to provide a foundation for wealth accumulation for many Americans and helped lift many Americans into the middle class. The FHA, their own underwriting guidelines, talked about the importance of looking at the racial concentration of a neighborhood before making a loan in a neighborhood and further cemented this association between race and risk. And so it wasn't just these policies, right, by HLLC and the Federal Home Loan Bank, but there are bevy of policies and laws, the Indian Removal Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Social Security Act, Model Cities, Urban Renewal. All of these programs had policies that were race-based, that were used in a way that harmed and hurt and withheld opportunities and wealth from people of color and African Americans in particular. So we have these sort of centuries of discrimination, discriminatory practices that are inculcated. They're baked into our systems, they're baked into our data, they are baked into our society. And what we have never done is used a race-based remedy to extract that harmful discriminatory laden information from our society, from our data, from our systems. No, what we've done is we've built upon this data that is harmful. So if you think about the adage, you know, sort of bad data in, bad outcomes, discriminatory data in, discriminatory outcomes, there's no other way around it. And so it's one of the reasons why we have a dual credit market in the United States. So let me say a couple of things. I mean, one of the reasons that it was so easy to have race-based policies that were weaponized against communities of color is because after the Civil War, after the ending of slavery, we had over 100 years of Jim Crow, right? This legalized apartheid in which we created, segregated and separate and unequal societies and our neighborhoods became segregated. Our neighborhoods were not segregated. We are more segregated today than we were 100 years ago. But it set up this design, this very easy design where we could go in and target predominantly white communities with great credit and withhold good credit opportunities, safe credit opportunities from communities of color, but simultaneously target those same communities of color for bad and crippling and debilitating credit, which is what we've done. So this is the U.S. market place in which we operate today. I'll just say a couple of things. That tan side represents the fringe market, the blue side represents the safe market. Let me focus on the tan side and lift up a couple of things very briefly before I take my seat. When you access credit in that tan space, it endures to benefit the creditor, not the consumer. When you pay your obligations on time in that tan space, systematically the way that the credit is provided, those positive payments do not get reflected to the credit repositories. My mother and my father got there alone from a subprime lender because no prime lender would give my parents a loan. That positive payment that they made every single month never got reflected in the credit repository system and so therefore never a year to their benefit. Conversely, don't pay your obligations, go to collections, and that negative information is reflected in the credit repository system. So I could go on, I really could go on all day, I will not, I will take my seat, but I wanted you to see, we are dealing with structural issues. We're dealing with structural barriers and one of the things we have to do is punch a hole through this barrier and create mechanisms that help ferry people from that tan space into that blue space. Okay, thank you. We're gonna shift next, I think, to Lauren. Is that okay, Lauren? Lauren Willis is up next. Lauren Willis is also in our rarefied world of being a law professor. She comes to us from California where she's at the Loyola Law School and Lauren, I think, I can summarize her corpus of literature by saying we can pretty much solve everything with financial literacy and education. So just so you know, I'm the, actually, the world's biggest critic of financial literacy education. That's it. I still am called upon despite the fact that I'm tired of talking about it because no one will speak against it because it's like apple pie. So I wanna talk about something totally different. And this relates a lot to things that Commissioner Chauville was talking about earlier today. Sorry, here, yes. Okay, so I wanna talk about digital deception. And what do I mean by that? I mean the use of modern technology. So big data tracking, analyzing the data with algorithmic prediction, machine learning or AI to deceive people or treat them unfairly, usually through some kind of digital interface. And just examples of how the technology is used. Each homepage of this casino is personalized. So there is no single homepage. It depends on your characteristics. So if you're someone who gets excited by white women's cleavage, then they give you that one. And you have significant past use of the casino. So they think you're a high roller. If you're the type of person who wants to impress his friends, according to their analyses, they'll show you the one on the left. The technology knows where you are, when you are. It's lunchtime and you're next to this restaurant. So your mobile phone sends you an advertisement for it. Here again is a time of day one. Optimize-ly is actually one of the more sophisticated players in the space. So it's not as though every business does this themselves, they hire Optimize-ly or personalize these various services to help them do it. Financial services industry is incredibly sophisticated about this and for good reason, right? They've developed this for fraud detection. So depending on the angle at which you hold your cell phone, how hard you push the cell phone when you're hitting to type things. The cadence of your typing on your computer. So that and 497 other data points about you are used by banks for fraud detection to make sure it's you. However, that same data can be used to determine things like, are you anxious? Are you intoxicated? Are you exhausted or depressed? Now obviously all of this is about predictive analytics. None of it's 100% until recently I received online ads for the larger women clothing thing. So I forget what they called it, but the big and beautiful women. So clearly it's not totally accurate of course yet, but that's the direction that we are moving in. So it's even more than simply taking in data, but things like in-game advertising. Yeah, sure they can see whether you're winning or losing to decide what ads to deliver to you. They can see whether you seem to be in a flow state, which means that you're likely to push any button to get rid of whatever pops on the screen so you can keep playing, right? But they also can make the game harder or easier, depending on whether it seems beneficial to make you frustrated or exhilarated. And after some of this mood manipulation stuff came out from Facebook, there actually was quoted one guy from Facebook saying, what do you mean this is a problem? This is what social networks do, is we manipulate people's moods. That's our whole job. And so clearly it's very widespread. Now you might think, oh, this is crazy fiction stuff, but when you look out there you see how widespread it is. So this is sort of a dated and very rudimentary version of how it happens. Today rather than testing three different images each with three different types of text, combined each of those with 15 different personality prediction types plus contexts. So where you are when you're being shown this stuff, it's blow this up a thousand times, right? But it gives you the basic idea. And here this is coming off the screen. I have written there at the bottom real-time, what they call real-time personalization, but what I would call real-time optimization of what they call conversions, which means it makes it more likely that you will do what they want you to do. Conversion means do whatever it is, the person who's delivering this to you or the company that's delivering this to you wants you to do. And so in fact, if you deliver people exactly what they want, it turns out to be less lucrative than delivering people something slightly different than what they actually want. Now, all of this is set up for machines to optimize conversions, optimize profit. And inevitably that means that where deception is profitable, these machines will evolve towards deception. Deception isn't always profitable, and not in every place, but certainly in some places, in some circumstances it is. So here's just an example of what's called a dark pattern. So you start reading, because we scan rather than reading websites, and you see that, oh, don't worry, your card will not be charged. And so you immediately move on, but you have just signed up for a negative option plan. And you can go to darkpatterns.org and see dozens of these sort of very common patterns that are used. Now, here's one where I am speculating. So I want to make that clear up front, because I have not been able to get very much information from the CFPB. The CFPB only put out very vague information on what happened in this case. This was a case against PayPal in 2015, and PayPal was signing people up for PayPal credit, and people didn't realize that, that they were paying with PayPal credit. Now, how did this happen? Well, I'm speculating as to how it happened. I immediately got on one of these websites, and you see how you think, you see the two options at the top, pay with PayPal, pay with debit credit, et cetera, so you think you're not paying with PayPal, right? You click on pay with something else. Now, let's see how then there's the three tabs at the bottom. Well, a machine might decide to try various combinations of which tab is shown to you, right? Now, at least on my computer, if I want to buy something, I just press one button and it auto fills. So I'm not even looking at which tab is open there, so I don't see that I'm actually signing up for PayPal credit. I think I'm just paying with my debit or credit card like I normally do. So I'm speculating as to that's how it happened, but clearly it happened. And you can imagine, though, that a machine testing various iterations of this website would figure out what's the most lucrative, right? And obviously, for some people in some states, it's better not to show them this. They might complain. People who are likely to complain. There's more and more data used to identify who those folks are and not offer them things that might cause a complaint, for example. Oh, and this also brings up something that the commissioner mentioned earlier, too. So CFPB got $10 million in civil penalties in this case. That was .003% of PayPal's gross income that year, and they had been doing this for a number of years. How widespread is this? Creative content personalization, meaning that the automated, meaning that machines are doing this, is being used. The blue lines are companies that are already doing it. The orange lines are ones who are planning to do it, and the gray ones are the ones that are not. So it's really very common now. So the resulting deception, though, results in some serious challenges for the way we normally handle deception, legally, how we normally go after it. I mean, obviously, one thing is very hard to even perceive it's happening, to prove that it happened because things are moving and that kind of thing. But one issue is we often look for business intent evidence. But if it's a machine that's doing it, you're not going to have business intent evidence when you go after this with either a private action or a public enforcement action. We also, for assessing deception, legally we use frequently the reasonable person standard that the judge applies. But none of this is developed for the reasonable person. It's developed ultimately for an audience of one. The woman, the single woman with kids who is very anxious because she's got a whole bunch of debts and she's willing to believe this website that tells her if she signs up for this debt consolidation program that she will not be charged any fees. So it's not, the digital standard just doesn't apply. This reasonable person standard just doesn't apply. It's really just this particular person. And so the judge looks at it and thinks, oh, this isn't deceptive. I can see that little tiny star at the bottom that says, oh, by the way, we're going to charge your credit card. So another thing we use is expert analysis, facial analysis or they call it usability analysis in the UX world. And the problem there is that, again, it's the audience of one and also you don't know what's going on but that got the consumer to that particular interface. Right? The expert doesn't know, are they holding their phone in such a way to indicate that they're intoxicated? So the expert just doesn't have access to all that information that the firm does. Oh, and by the way, it's not that the firm knows the person's intoxicated. The firm knows that there's a particular pattern in which you hold your phone which makes you more likely to do certain things. Right? So there's no knowledge per se about this necessarily. Then sort of the gold standard, I think the FTC has called it in enforcement of deception cases. So to do a randomized controlled trial sounds so scientific. So send this website or this, you know, mobile phone app or whatever, show it to a bunch of different consumers and get their responses where they fooled by it. Compare it to a group that's shown sort of a sanitized version that doesn't contain the misleading whatever it was. Okay, now obviously you cannot match the subjects, consumer subjects to who would have actually been shown each of these ads and you can't recreate the context just like an expert doesn't know the context. In addition for all of these three forms of evidence here, they can end up with, I think Direct TV said they had 20,000 different iterations of their website, right? You can't test that many. You can't test a statistically representative sample of that many, right? Even if they had 100 websites, you'd have to test 49 of them which is very expensive to do and time consuming. Now the FTC and some judges have really, you know, labored on on this. Like in 2010, I think the commission reviewed 36 different advertisements or marketing materials in one case. There was another case in 2015 where a judge went through 125 different ones over the course of like a couple of years like she didn't do what all it wants. But Direct TV, FTC lost in part and only in part admittedly on the basis that they had not tested a sample, a statistically significant sample of Direct TV's 20,000 different iterations. So the effect here, although it was not intended, the effect of this technology could be to immunize firms from liability for deception. So what to do about this? So one thing is to realize that the reasonable person under the circumstances, which is actually the language of the test for deception, has to be a reasonable person under the circumstances would be deceived, is the one person who received it. So rather than having to show, oh, reasonable people would be deceived by this, that you would have to show that the actual customer who took the action that was desired by the firm was deceived by the materials. Customer behavior evidence. So all these people opening accounts and none of them are using the accounts, well, that might be some indication that they didn't know they had opened the accounts. Let's see. There's also, I think this has fallen off here. Well, I don't know. Let's go to the next page. So another thing that I think we should do is take a brilliant move in Dodd-Frank, which was the creation of the abuse of the stand. And I don't think this should qualify for unfairness, too. Rather than requiring the regulator and enforcement agency and private plaintiffs to prove causation from the particular materials to the particular consumer, just say it is deceptive. It is abusive. It is unfair to take advantage of consumer confusion, regardless of whether you cause the confusion or not. And I'm not sure why my slides are all running off here, but the language from Dodd-Frank would support that. Obviously that's limited to the consumer finance context. Only the CFPB can enforce it, but we should, and state AGs, as we talked about yesterday, but we should expand the use of that and the availability of those standards to address this new problem and then firms would have an incentive to continue to optimize conversions within the constraint of not confusing consumers. Okay. Thank you, Lauren. Okay, we're going to go to Rob next. Rob is the senior counsel with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. And has the singular pleasure of working in our nation's capital in the U.S. And so he will uplift us all now. Okay, thank you. Thanks, John. I feel naked behind me all of a sudden, being the only person without a PowerPoint. So I'm Rob Rendava with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. We are a coalition of more than 200 national organizations founded in 1950 and we've been involved in every single major civil rights legislative campaign since then. Our membership ranges from, I mean, it includes a lot of groups that were involved in those legislative fights from the get-go. And then more relevantly for today's discussion, it also includes a number of consumer organizations, Center for Responsible Lending, National Consumer Law Center, and many others. And I've been there since 2001, unlike some people who talked about their first job yesterday. This is my third job. Thank you, Wade Henderson. And I've been involved in helping shape our coalition's policy and messaging around housing and lending issues since around 2005. Impeccable timing, I know, just in time for the crisis. So I wanted to just build on the context that Lisa laid out about the historic patterns of discrimination and take it forward to talk about where our coalition is on issues around FinTech. And then if I have time left, I'd like to just talk a little bit about our broader coalition's priorities on housing and lending issues moving forward. Like most people, I'm still struggling to wrap my brain around what FinTech actually is. You know, the field is evolving so fast that it's hard to form really concrete opinions. But like the early days of the Internet, I wanted to thrive and I wanted to do well, but I also know that there are going to be a whole lot of bumps along the way. And what we've seen so far is a mixed bag, where, you know, with some products that can be helpful and then others that are the same predatory wine being poured out of new skins. And, you know, for example, there are some new products that let consumers access their own wages ahead of their scheduled payday. Some of them, like PayActive, this is a product by Walmart, have pretty modest fees and they're directly connected to payrolls and they cost a whole lot less than a payday loan. And then there are others. Lauren talked about some of the kinds of deceptions that get written into products. And there's ones like Ernin that look flashy and new, but pose the same concerns as payday loans. This one in particular uses some system of tips instead of in the place of fees. And I would just point, folks, to the National Consumer Law Center did a great report several weeks ago on the whole range of fintech products and the pros and cons of each of them. And so I would definitely have you take a look at those. But I want to talk a little bit more about a, just start with a more global concern and then a few specifics. I think for the most part, the regulatory framework to protect consumers and to help defend anti-discrimination statutes is still there, but it really comes down to who's doing the regulating. And by comparison, in the years before the mortgage crisis, in fact, since the 1990s, regulators under laws like HOPA had the authority at the framework in place to stop mortgages that weren't in the interests of consumers. And this is something that Lisa and Mike Calhoun and others of us went to the regulators and tried to get them to invoke, but they didn't do that until it was too late. Since the CFPB has opened its doors, I think they've done a good job of trying to keep up with the industry, but the biggest concern for us needless to say is who's in charge of the CFPB in the coming years and what they plan to do with the laws already on the books. When it comes to anti-discrimination laws, as you all know, early last year, Mick Mulvaney announced that he was breaking up the office of fair lending and moving its functions around. And for us, this was a big step back from the CFPB's commitment to fair lending enforcement. And our concerns over that extend to fintech, maybe even more. And that's because all too often consumers don't actually know that they face discrimination. And if you have regulators whose mission is fair lending, but they don't have the supervisory authority, then discrimination goes undiscovered. And if those regulators don't have enforcement authority, even if the discrimination is discovered, then it goes unaddressed. And so that gets even more complicated when you're talking about new technologies that are harder for regulators to understand. Mulvaney told us that his decision was about efficiency and responsiveness. Not that he meets with us a whole lot face to face, but I did get a chance to ask him directly and didn't get any explanation of how his decision would ensure that civil rights laws would be enforced just as vigorously moving forward. And Director Kreninger hasn't given us the assurance that we need either. So that's going to be an area we're going to continue pressing the CFPB. But I want to touch on a few more specific concerns. One of them, and this came up a couple of times yesterday, is the issue of sandboxes. There's a lot to be said about giving companies the chance, giving them the right setting to test new products and new disclosures. But what the CFPB wants to do is so broad that it poses a much more significant threat to consumer protection. These wouldn't be limited to one company. This trade organization could apply on behalf of an entire industry and without sensible and clear time constraints either. So there's a place for narrowly tailored, no action letters. But with these sandbox proposals, we're talking about, really talking about an exception that swallows not just one rule, but a whole lot of them in the process. And we've voiced our concerns to the CFPB, but we don't know that we're likely to persuade them, but it's so broad and so beyond the CFPB's authority that we think it's going to wind up facing legal challenges as it moves forward. Another concern that's already in the making is the OCC taking applications for what they call special purpose national charters. This is where FinTechs can obtain the same power as OCC banks to preempt state consumer protection laws. And there's a long history of OCC really aggressively preempting state laws, and that history is not good, going back to the subprime bubble. And the OCC has done very little to reassure us that things will be different this time. On a similar note, third concern is with an ongoing effort in Congress to overturn the Madden v. Midland case out of the Second Circuit. And this would allow non-bank lenders to essentially rent federally chartered banks in order to do an end run around state usury caps. And you might have heard this referred to as valid when made legislation or the Protecting Consumers Access to Credit Act. Yeah, that name sounds pretty benign, but every time I hear Access to Credit coming up, my guard, I mean, just as a result of what we've seen, that term was thrown around so much in the years before the crisis by people who were fighting regulation. And so my guard always goes up, and I hope it does for you as well. Finally, I want to give a little overview of what our coalition sees as priorities for the next two years and beyond. Needless to say, we're looking at a Senate and an administration that is not likely to give us a lot of what we want. But there are a lot of good ideas out there, and we're working with our allies in the House and the Senate to lift them up and show they have widespread support and hopefully keep building the pressure for changes when we can get them. First, we want to ensure that the Fair Housing Act, ECOA, and other key civil rights and consumer protection laws are fully and fairly enforced. For one, this includes bills by Maxine Waters to undo some of the recent changes made by the CFPB and by HUD around the Fair Housing Act and CFPB's Fair Lending Office. It also includes, I might add, a bill by Al Green to provide a lot more money for Fair Housing Act testing and enforcement. And second, affordable housing is so crucial to overall financial health that we have to keep making the case for more a bit. We've spent a lot of time in the past few months working with Senator Warren on a bill to drastically increase housing supply and just take some steps through down payment assistance and CRA improvements to help address some of the lasting damage done by redlining. It's not a perfect bill. There are some great ideas and there are some that need some work, but there, I think, I really hope it's going to do a lot to put affordable housing on the national spotlight over the next year and a half. And I'm glad that Pat mentioned GSEs because that's, there's a lot at stake for affordable housing policy in that debate and running from the affordable housing goals to the National Housing Trust Fund. And there are hearings next Tuesday and Wednesday in Senate banking, as a matter of fact, on proposals that would pose a real threat to those. Third, we want to help promote policies that will increase inclusive and responsible financial products in this changing industry. Among other things, that includes getting rid of forced arbitration and promoting credit reporting reforms. Student lending is another area. And I'm looking forward to Wade's panel on that this afternoon. And then finally, we're going to be spending a lot of time with Maxine Waters Committee in its oversight role, not just on what this administration is doing wrong. They could spend a lot of time on that, but also in, there's a new diversity and inclusion subcommittee headed by Joyce Beatty who, where I think we can do a lot of work on helping to promote what the industry could do to get it right. So I'll stop there. Thank you. Thanks very much. Okay. I'm going to exercise some chairs discretion here and I'd like to just share, I want to leave it some time for discussion and the panel's involvement, but I'm going to give myself about a couple of minutes just to talk about something that I'm interested in right now and exploit my captive audience. So I'm trying to figure out, I'm new to the game here about what to do about the rent to own market, which I find one of the most troubling areas of dealing with what at least called the fringe lending sector. And here's why I'm troubled by it. I'm troubled by it both, what I'll say in law professor talk is normatively and I'm also troubled by it doctrinally. I say this quite candidly. I'm normatively troubled by it because some of my cynicism of consumer regulation study just makes me presumptively suspect of it because I think it's predatory bottom feeding. On the other hand, I'm more attracted to it than I am with straight, untethered, unfettered, payday lending, the wage advance things because at least it's bounded, right? You're bounded by whatever the TV or the fridge is in question. Now you're going to pay five times for the TV in the fridge, so I guess make the bad side, but it's a lesser evil in my mind so much so that it might win me over to the access to market rhetoric that I know is thrown around quite easily and cheaply and exploitively by the lobbyists who use it. It's a big industry. It's about eight billion according to what I found. It is doctrinally challenging because it's really hybrid-y between leases and purchases to get to the commercial law area, right? It is rent, but it's also rent-to-own and something that we wrestle with in the field of commercial law is the distinction between a real lease and a purchase because there's different regulatory ramifications, tax and stuff, and bankruptcy and insolvency. And this kind of sits in the middle. And one of the things that we fall back on in our area of law when we try to cut through the thicket and figure out what this really is as a delice or a purchase is we look at economic risk and economic reality. And on the one hand, this is why it's so difficult. Facially, the economic risk is on the less or, right? The rental center can get it back again and so they have the residual interest so they say it's a real lease. On the other hand, if you start to drill down on the contractual provisions, there's a lot of risk they offload onto the consumer, right? Like if it burns down, guess who that gets passed on to? And I won't even get into what the fees are. There was a great study by the FTC's Bureau of Economics back in 2000 about this, and that's already now outdated but it had some good information. And it found that there were people who were very happy. There was a high satisfaction rate with it. But then there was a follow-up study in 2003 that explored the satisfaction more and actually suggested that the consumers of this market are more stratified and might be sorting into two categories and it's going to be, in my opinion, worrisome as to how they sort. Because when it's a rent-to-own situation, some people actually just do rent and they treat it as a rental of chattels and then they go away. And other people treat it as a financing plan of how they're going to purchase something. And guess who's happy with it The people who are happy are the people who are maybe moving to short-term, rent for a bit, don't need the property more and move on. The people who are unhappy with it are the people who go into the store are completely deceived by the kiosk that's for rent-to-center because they actually think they're buying the furniture at the furniture store not realizing that they're going to a third-party financier and then end up realizing they're paying three times, four times, five times, whatever it is for. And I'm also indirectly supported in my anxiety about this by two helpful data points. One is that the business model seems largely premised upon miscalculation and deception of fees and so there's huge balloon payments involved in when you make your option to purchase at the end. And anytime you rely on balloon payments when there's a low fixed monthly fee, that should start to be your yellow flag area of consumer behavioral heuristics. Secondly, there's more fees than I can shake a stick at. It makes a credit card agreement seem, you know, relatively straightforward and terse. And those are not just the price disclosure, but my favorite is there's a purchase fee. So once you've made your payments, a standard term is if you want to buy the thing at the end that you've bought, you've got to pay a fee for that. I guess that's to process the bill of sale for the chattel. I don't entirely know. So the structural deception makes me anxious. So what do we do? By the way, it'll make you even more anxious if you start to drill down on who are the purchasers and who are the renters. Three guesses as to which way the demographics go or who are using this as a purchase technique and as a financing mechanism. So any regressive concerns you have are vindicated by this. So the theme of our conference is uncertainty, right? What do you do in the nature of uncertainty? And I asked the question yesterday and I don't know if I'm getting older and so my brain is getting more tired, but I like the open-ended abusiveness standard to scare people. But I also just like the appeal of some good hard regulations. And just put some numbers on there and let's have minimum capital requirements for banks. And so what we've done in, I know Basel's off-stage, but what we've done for regulation of this at the state level is states that have regulated have gone for some really hard numbers. So Michigan has a 45% rule, which is if you've paid off the rental payments, you can make the full purchase with a deduction minus 40%. I can't even articulate it. I'm just going to introduce it for the truth of 45%. Okay? California has a two-and-a-quarter rule. So the actual nominal addition of the rent payments can't be more than 2.25 times the cash price of the actual good, which by the way is still 125% markup, but let's let it go. I will call that a generous user regulation. New York has statutorily a matrix where it's like, well, it depends on the age of the product and it depends on the condition of the product and that's what our maximum rates are going to be. Very finely regulated, all with hard numbers. And they have like Schumeri box type things too that say you got to say this is your total purchase price if you buy it over the time. Now of course, the more effective the disclosure is and the more salient the disclosure is, the more you have to start stuffing stuff into fees for it to be profitable, which is how this business model keeps going, which is why the fees make me anxious about it. So I said add one piece of anxiety, which is that the fee dependency of the model makes me suspect of its comprehensibility to consumers. The second thing that gives me a flag that I'm into the right area that we should be regulating is when the CFPB went after Rent-A-Center. Yes, Rent-A-Center of the arbitration case is Rent-A-Center. Rent-A-Center fought like hungry dogs the suggestion that they were subject to regulation for this behavior by the FTC. We're not a financial service. My God, we're just merchants. We just sell stuff and there's a little bit of financing on the back end. The CFPB rejected that position but the fact that they were so anxious about distinguishing themselves as providing a financial service should give you some idea as to how much they like those stones being overturned. Rent-A-Center, by the way, is based in Plano, Texas. So remember the natural laboratories and the beauty of the one-way ratchet of CFPB. Let me tell you how Texas regulates this where Rent-A-Center is there. Texas has criminal laws for a wonderful crime, which can be a felony, called theft of service. And the idea of the law was for people who skip out on their hotel rooms, right? It's not theft of chattels, it's theft of service and you get prosecuted and you can go to it. Well, in places like McClellan County where Waco is in central Texas, 98% of the prosecutions of theft of service at the local office is for people who don't turn back the chattel for their rent-to-own contracts. They're being criminally prosecuted as a collection technique to light a fire under them to think about whether they want to pay for their rapidly depreciated and no longer used chattel. And the Texas Tribune did a study on this. They did a nice exposé journalism thing called Nerd Wallet as well was in there too. And they found out that these, they're just going after mom and dad consumers for TVs and stuff like that threatening criminal prosecution and getting them down to fingerprinting. And they candidly admit, oh, if they pay, we dropped the prosecution, which is pretty much in my bankruptcy world a civil attempt to collect the judgment. Anyway, I'll stop there. I want to talk about 30 seconds, then we'll open it for discussion, which is we didn't really get a chance to talk about small business, which is fine because everyone's allowed to talk about what they want to, but the panel said, we might look at small business market. I'll give you 30 seconds on this, which is I do work for now for the federal government involved in United Nations work. We'll see how long that lasts. And the United Nations Uncitral Commission is trying to work on insolvency standards for micro-small medium enterprises, which is a big thing, right? Micro-economies, micro-merchants. And it is one of the hardest things for us to do because we can deal with big cross-border chapter 11-type things. But when you start to get down to regulate small business, what we realize in insolvency, and this is probably true with other regulatory fields, is it blends so quickly into the personal that it's hard to take a conception of discrete business entities, like limited liability. It's not limited liability. They're sole proprietors, and even if they do have some sort of organization, they're all independently guaranteeing the debt. And so when you start to talk about small businesses, you really are talking about individuals, and it's a very difficult border to do. So that's a little bit of despair. Okay. That's all I'm going to say. I'd like to ask a couple questions, and then I'm going to open up for group discussions, too, if that's okay. And you guys can say, I don't have time to talk about that. Let's start with Pat. Pat, I want to know, first of all, I'll give you a softball. You can say, well, goodness, shouldn't the market discipline whether borrowers have the ability to pay and da, da, da. And then I'm going to ask a more serious question, which is what about the argument of the GSC patch subsidy of the family? Is that just, you know, law and economics voodoo? Or is there real some stuff there? We are worried about the subsidy. What do you think? So to answer your first question, no. I think experience proved that disastrously, that leaving the markets to underwrite ability to repay didn't work. And inflicted untold harm on people in the lower half of the income spectrum. With respect to the subsidy, I have to say, I've really been on the fence on this one. I went into my time at the CFPB being a pretty ardent, Fannie Freddie supporter. And then in my time there, found impersonal interactions with the GSCs found them throwing their political weight around in really shameless ways that were anti-consumer. For example, in the fights over trying to water down foreclosure protections in state law for borrowers. And so I think we need to think very carefully about when we're supporting Fannie and Freddie, what are the standards to which they're held? What are the standards to which they're held with respect to their political lobbying, which continues in conservatorship? It was not supposed to, but it does continue. The GSC patch does operate as an implicit subsidy because it is more liberal than the regular QM exception, and it's also more liberal than the treatment of loans sold to Wall Street. The premise for that is that GSC underwriting is regulated. It is more careful than loans sold to Wall Street. I think certainly based on pre-crisis events, there are reasons to take that position, but when I was at the CFPB, my argument was we should just have one definition of QM and not splinter it among the GSCs, among loans held in portfolio versus Wall Street, which is the mess we have today. Okay, thank you. And I'd like to apologize because I don't think my microphone or probably user error, so for those of you who are online and stuff like that, I apologize if my comments aren't being picked up. Maybe I'll be transcribed in the minutes, and you can look at those later. Lisa, I wanted to ask you a question. By the way, I didn't even understand some of the structural history of redlining, and I get the Japanese internment, I get where that's coming from. I didn't even know there was structural stuff into the Social Security Act, so that shows you how naive I am about that. Is it too base or boring for you to explain that to me or what it is? What is the structural stuff in the Social Security Act? I think you've explained relatively easily to the group. Certainly. So in the Social Security Act was first implemented, there were certain categories of labor that were excluded, and those categories of labor correlated very highly with communities of color. And so you'll find things like that throughout, like the litany of laws that I listed up there, and those were just a handful of them. I didn't list all of them. The point was that the discrimination embedded into our marketplace was so systemic, it reached so deeply, so far back, so broad and wide, that the argument today that, well, we'll just implement race-neutral policies and everybody will be treated fairly, but this doesn't hold water. And it is one of the reasons why we so fervently need the disparate impact standard, the disparate impact doctrine, both under the Federal Fair Housing Act and under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, among other laws, employment, et cetera, so that we can tear down these structural barriers that are keeping people from opportunities. We can change systems to make them fair for everyone, and hopefully, in the process, try to eliminate some of the disparate harm, the harm that is caused by these inequities, these sort of innate inequities that we've been talking about. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification. And that actually ties in with the rent-to-own stuff, too, because one of the hooks they give for people is to say, when they get in the choice, do you want to buy or do you want to do this rent-to-own contract? And they say, now, the great thing about a rent-to-own contract is you start to establish a credit history, and so you'll get more monthly payments, which will help you out, right? And you saw the concern about the credit history, so there's a quite effective exploitation. Lauren, I'm overwhelmed because the robots are coming to take over us again. I'm scared. I do want to say that one of the major models to disclosure fixes everything, one of the major premises of that model is that, hey, if we just get all the information out there, even if not everybody reads it, all we need is Ralph Nader reading it, or someone's going to read it, and then that information will disseminate and that will discipline, because as long as someone reads it, who knows what's going on, the other people can free ride off that informational cross-subsidy. How does that work in an individualized environment? So it doesn't even work very well in the mass environment, right? And the evidence is that people don't actually read them. Incredibly small numbers, certainly not enough to tame the market. And it's even better when you can make sure that those that you think might tame the market, like, perhaps us, don't get that term. You hide the stuff that might raise suspicions like, don't send that to the professors. Yeah, yeah. Although I must admit, I actually recently hit a button that I thought meant I was watching a movie that was already covered by the Amazon Prime membership that I have, and it turns out it wasn't. I had signed up for an entirely new form of Amazon Prime. I guess there are multiple kinds. I had no idea. I was, of course, doing this, like, in the dark, trying to not, you know, derring you quickly before my kids woke up, you know. So, perhaps there was some sensing going on there. But, you know, it's not intentional, I would say. You know, perhaps there's reckless indifference, but I think we need to sort of move beyond worrying about, oh, they're trying to get us to just, like, let's help, how should we run this so that it's fair for everybody? Right? And I think there's a little bit of a tendency to rush for technological fixes, but the government is not going to be as good at figuring out those technological fixes and staying ahead of the curve. And so that's why I think rather than sort of all these sort of specific kinds of rules. Well, you can't, you know, have this phrase here on the page that instead we need to do things like work with the abusiveness rule. Now, there are a standard. And certainly there could be things like, well, once it's an identified dark pattern, you can't do it anymore. Also, there I think could be quite a lot of value to some standardization in the way in which information is presented and certain kinds of buttons, because, you know, you think you're doing yes, yes, yes, but it turns out, or no, no, no, but it turns out one of those actually purchased the extra leg room on the travel insurance or whatever. And I know with some of those kiosks, there's a bunch of issues with elderly people ending up with things they didn't intend to end up with at the airport, right? So we could have some per se rules and some standardization that would certainly help. But, you know, it's, the machines are pretty creative. And, you know, obviously we're not there yet. There still is actually a lot of evidence that you can find, because people internally at some of these companies will bring up, but wait a second, this is fooling people, and then you'll find a paper trail, you know. But people will certainly learn to be quiet about it at some point. You know, God bless email, because it just means there's always some sort of paper trail, you know, if ignition switches or whatever. Not anymore, though, right? There's going to be, people are not using email or something. Okay, and then I want to go to the group, but Rob, I'll ask you a quick question, which is, back to your broader point, which I think is one worth thinking about, which is that the identity of the regulators can matter as much, if not more, than the content of the regulation. For a group that has a mission like yours, does that mean you should start getting involved in personnel matters and lobbying on the personnel there, or should you just stick to the content? Or do you do that already, maybe? Yeah, I mean we do weigh in on who's being nominated to these agencies. You know, of course, our attention is split a little bit between who's regulating and then also much more critical in a lot of ways, who's deciding the cases. I mean, that is a huge part of our agenda and a huge part of where our time goes. And what Craninger does, I mean, she has a five-year term. I mean, there are things that she can do that we don't like, but what some of the judicial norms that are getting appointed for lifetime positions, that damage just is going to go for decades when they make the wrong decisions. Okay, well, this is the cheery panel. So I'm going to ask, if there's people who have questions, we have microphones going around, if people have questions to anyone on the panel. We've got some up here. Thank you. It's a great panel, and I'm delighted to have heard all of you. This is a question for Lisa Rice. Lisa, I know that NAFSA recently settled a lawsuit with Facebook regarding its ads, its advertising. Could you talk a little bit about that, give us a sense of what that was about? Thanks so much for raising that question, Wade. It's actually a scary proposition for me as the head of a civil rights organization. When I look at my organizational chart, I am usually looking at filling positions like investigators or counsel or public policy analysts or researchers. Never did I think I'd have to be trying to fill positions for tech analysts and algorithmic specialists and things like that. But it's what the world is coming to and what we have to do. And this case against Facebook involved a situation where Facebook engaged in several activities. One is they actually designed their advertising platform where advertisers for housing and credit and employment services were utilizing their platform. The platform was designed in a way that not only encouraged people to discriminate but helped to facilitate that discrimination and the discrimination was built into the model, the design. So for example, you could exclude audiences from seeing your ads and you could include to help amplify certain audiences. You want to see your ads. When you go to Facebook's PACE website and you click on exclude, there are menus that drop down. These are pre-populated lists. Under multicultural or ethnic affinities, boxes drop down African American, Native American, Asian American, Hispanic. And so you can exclude all of those audiences. There's no box for white audiences. So you could never exclude white audiences. Same thing for the inclusion categories. Which means that white audiences are the default. So that was built into the system. But the other thing is that they have these algorithmic formulas as Lauren was talking about that optimize who gets to see what type of ad. And as, you know, to the point that we were making earlier about the discrimination that is sort of embedded into our systems, just like if you are finding that optimizing for deception is more profitable, you can optimize for discrimination. If it proves to be more profitable. So those are things that we are going to continue to work with Facebook about. I have to say, though the settlement is historic, we didn't think that we would ever get to a settlement. We thought that we were going to be litigating this case for a long time. But our friends in the civil rights community really got behind this case and pushed it, our friends at leadership conference LDF and NAACP, et cetera and pushed Facebook to settle this issue because it is impacting so many audiences. As Lauren explained, it is so critically important but there will be disparate impact issues that are raised as we go forward. Facebook made eight big changes not only to their platform and their systems but to their policies. It is a first step really. There is more work to be done and I am going to be relying more on people like Lauren to help us walk through these kinds of issues because they are highly technical, they are highly complicated. If you think about it, these are proprietary systems, right? These companies don't want to see sunlight. They don't want to bring sunlight too. So we really need experts who are working in this space to help us to get behind what is really happening. Thank you. I am surprised Facebook even thought about going to trial on that. Well, they thought they had immunity under what is called the Communications Decency Act and all internet providers to Rohit's point earlier that we do need to do some work to bring our civil rights laws up to date. I mean, look, the Fair Housing Act was passed seven days after Dr. King's assassination in 1968. And so it did not anticipate these new platforms, right, in these new spaces that we are dealing in. These civil rights laws did not anticipate that the robots were coming to get us. They really are, Lauren. And so we do need to think about this as we move forward, but I will also say that the Fair Housing Act has been interpreted very broadly, and the Supreme Court has said that the Fair Housing Act should be interpreted as broadly as possible to sort of try and cover for some of these eventualities. Thank you. Hi. My question is for Lisa Rice. In talking about the discrimination being embedded in various laws, I wondered if you could speak to whether there's a history in that sense with reverse mortgages. That's a great question. And I would love to have Patricia weigh in on this question, too, because she's done a lot of work on this area. So one of the challenges that we have with reverse mortgages is that because of the dual credit market, because of the huge disparity in wealth between African-Americans and whites, the ability of African-Americans to successfully utilize a reverse mortgage is profoundly diminished. I mean, African-Americans on average just do not have the type of equity in our homes that white families do. African-Americans, as a result of the crash, are disproportionately underwater. So just the ability to access the product in and of itself is an issue because there's a huge gap there. But the way that the programs are just designed, there are still some problems. I think that there have been some efforts to try and clean them up. Those efforts haven't gone all the way and there are still major problems. And I apologize. It is not my area of expertise, so I've got to call on my colleagues to help out a little bit there. Yeah, I'd be happy to. I think we have to see reverse mortgages. Obviously, they're a much newer product than the traditional FHA forward mortgage. But we have to see it against the backdrop that on average, African-American families have far fewer retirement savings or decent defined benefit pensions to help them in retirement. And so beyond Social Security, which has its own problems, what these families may be left to fall back on is any equity in the home. And so we have to look at this issue not just as is the reverse mortgage a problematic product for people of color, but look at it in the larger system of woefully inadequate social safety nets for African-American families as they enter into their retirement years. I'm not sure that we can create a reverse mortgage product that works without equity. That says to me that we have larger issues to solve. And that there's probably a better way of going about retirement security than hinging everything on that. Yeah, and the one thing that I will say too is that I don't think that I think that we really need to think about whether or not it's the right idea to give a lump sum payment in the reverse mortgage product and if we shouldn't go back to making it more of like an annuity because there are some dangers there. We have seen so many senior citizens abused when they get that lump sum payment and talk about the fee extrapolation rights. So I do think that that's one area that we need to revisit. Okay, other questions? That's not here. Thank you very much to the members of the panel. It's been quite a very interesting discussion. I've been struck by some of the issues that we've talked about also earlier in the day and sort of carrying on into this panel about unscrupulous behavior and how it affects contracts. And I'm wondering what your thoughts were on whether or not you see unconscionability as a doctrine that can sort of help to push back against some of the newer technical issues. Professor McCoy wants to comment on that. Lauren, you start. We are on the most miserable ALI project on this right now. Yeah, so Pat and I have been working on this draft restatement of consumer contracts. I brought this up yesterday at the end of the day. And it tries to rely on unconscionability and says basically consumers don't have to ascent to anything. You're bound by whatever the firm says you're bound to and that all you can do is default and defend yourself using unconscionability. Now that is pointless, right? That is not going to prevent bad terms from going in for all sorts of reasons, litigation reasons. People are not going to want to default first, right? And there's also the issue that when people read the fine print of contracts, which they don't do before entering into a contract, but occasionally they'll be part of it that is pointed out to them when they complain, they believe that's binding no matter what it says. If it says you have to pay a fee that you were explicitly told before you got into the contract that you wouldn't have to pay, you believe you have to pay it. I mean, there's been psychological research on this that's been coming out recently. And so once you put a term in there, people are going to think they're going to be bound by it, regardless, doesn't matter how unconscionable it is. Never mind that there's this history, too, of courts not wanting to find things unconscionable. I mean, so back in the Hopa days, right, when we were trying to get some of these mortgages looked at, there was a case where I think it was 98% of these women's monthly income was going to their mortgages and that was enough to find unconscionability, but the court was really hesitant about it. That was in the first circuit. And so, or Judge Young in Massachusetts. And so things that were less than that would not be enough. I think one of the really important things to realize here is a fatal flaw of this ALI project is it capitulates to the idea that today, since we don't read contract terms and especially in a non-line context, we may not even open up the disclosure to look at them. It capitulates and says, you're bound. Unless you can somehow persuade some court on a one-by-one contract basis to deny enforcement. Ultimately, where I had on that is that's an invitation to replacing contract law with statutory regulation. Ultimately, contract law is failing us if that's the path we're going down. I think we got time for at least one more question before we have to break. Who has jurisdiction to get the microphone there? And remember, seminal unconscionability, Williams will be Walker Thomas furniture in this, right? Implemented by regulation. The FTC is the one who came and took over and banned the practice that way. Hi, my question is for Robin, the panel in general. I want to know more about affordable housing. You mentioned down payment assistance, but rents in Detroit are rising at a faster pace than nationally. And then the West Coast, this seems to be a crisis. So can you talk, you mentioned it. Yeah, I mentioned, I mean, so there's a bill by Senator Warren that's one of the, there's a provision in there that provides down payment assistance to people who've lived in previously redlined neighborhoods. I mean, that's the original concept of the bill. The newer version of the bill also includes recaps, the affirmatively furthering fair housing maps as areas that can be targeted. And we're still working on, you know, how can we continue to improve that coverage? So it's helping people that deserve to be helped while not making it a free fall for people who, you know, who didn't experience the discriminatory conduct of the past. And so there is that down payment part. There's also significant investments in the National Housing Trust Fund to help with rental. And over, I mean, overall, it's just, it proposes adding a whole lot more housing units, rental, homeownership, and just the basic laws of letting the basic laws of supply and demand do their thing. And that's why I'm really enthusiastic about it. And I hope, I mean, how it gets implemented, I mean, how it would get implemented. Of course, there's a lot of questions around that as there is with any law, but at least I'm glad that this approach would hopefully elevate the national debate around housing because there's a lot of issues to pay attention to in the next year and a half, but housing often gets left out of the agenda and so. Okay, so let me conclude with a couple of things. First, I want to apologize for the microphone earlier. And secondly, in case we sound like we're too gloomy, I will close on my favorite fee I found for the rent-to-owns, which is the repossession fee. So if you decide to purchase it, you have to pay a fee. And if you decide to give it up, you have to pay a fee, which is not included in the price. Anyways, the positive note is states that regulate that California has banned those sorts of fees. So there is a role for hardline cap regulations to be played. Please, before we go into the lunch, join me in thanking this fantastic panel. And thank you for the questions.