The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s plan to regulate tribal lenders and other providers of short-term, often-high-interest loans comes at a sensitive stage for tribes’ involvement in the industry, as their efforts to kick-start lending businesses under the wary eye of the federal government recall the days before tribal gambling took off.
As the CFPB plans its new rule on short-term, small-dollar lending, tribes are worried that the agency will wade into regulating their lending businesses without sufficient knowledge of Indian law and sovereignty — much as both federal and state governments struggled to grasp how tribes could both regulate gambling and operate casinos when that industry was developing in the 1980s, experts say.
Read the full story here: http://www.law360.com/articles/763871/cfpb-lending-tussle-echoes-early-days-of-tribal-gambling
