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> Which is why contracts should include warnings, as Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed. How would this work? Isn't the contract itself supposed to be the warni

> Which is why contracts should include warnings, as Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed. How would this work? Isn't the contract itself supposed to be the warning? Obviously contracts can contain a lot of legalese and potentially unenforceable language that makes them difficult for most people to interpret, but that language is also necessary to specify the contract at the level of detail the law requires. If you require a warning for the contract, how do you ensure that the warning is sufficiently authentic?

rsynnott 9y ago
In Ireland, mortgage offers at least have to have plain-English warnings, illustrations of the numbers involved in paying it off, etc. Never got a PCP, but I assume it's similar. The problem is, people don't read them. To be useful, you'd arguably need to give the borrower an exam in what they're signing (which might be a good approach). PCPs, in particular, are complex as far as consumer finance goes, and a lot of people seem to sign them thinking they're a normal loan. An analogy seem to be the (now thankfully almost obsolete) endowment mortgages, where you took out an interest-only mortgage coupled with an investment product which was theoretically meant to pay off the principal on maturity. These ran into difficulty when inflation dropped to practically zero for a decade, and lots of people who had them thought they just had repayment mortgages...