By Edward Harrison This is the third in a series of posts about ideas for financial reform generated by the “Make Markets Be Markets” conference I attended yesterday in New York City on 3 Mar 2010. You can download all of the written presentations here. A century ago, anyone with a bathtub and some chemicals […]
Read more...This report from Katie Porter at Credit Slips, which describes another ruse by which banks are undermining new credit card rules, illustrates why we need principles based regulation in the US: Did Congress’ effort to protect you from your card company with the Credit CARD Act inspire you to pore over the new Cardmember “Agreement” […]
Read more...I’m normally loath to largely lift another post, but Adam Levitin at Credit Slips raises an interesting and potentially important question, and if I put it in Links, it would probably get less attention. His argument is effectively the routes that allowed banks to evade state usury laws (a Supreme Court decision plus adept jurisdiction-shopping) […]
Read more...With its talk of new taxes on banks, is Team Obama reverting to its now well established pattern of crony capitalist giveaways with the occasional phony populist reform as an increasingly ineffective disguise? The extraordinarily unenthusiastic, perhaps inept by design, discussion of its plans to tax banks in some yet undetermined manner certainly says so. […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC. The ugly mess at TCW over chief investment officer Jeff Gundlach’s recent departure, has prompted a number of headlines lately. I was surprised to learn that Gundlach had a number of dirty secrets, and not just the […]
Read more...Most of the time, I try to stick to writing up the worst abuses in the generally corrupt realm of financial services, but it’s important not to overlook the nickel and diming. First, if done on a big enough scale, it adds up to lots of money, and the amounts at issue are so small […]
Read more...Many readers have complained of credit card issuers raising interest rates on their cards, even if the customer has pristine credit and never or rarely carries a balance. Now we are finally seeing some efforts to see how significant this is across all card users. A Rasmussen survey puts the total at 50% of all […]
Read more...Small businesses have fair weather friends. Policymakers love to extol entrepreneurship. And in the last business cycle, even in the upswing, large corporations shed jobs while mid-sized and particularly small businesses added them. But when things get ugly, the best connected players get the breaks, and the little guy is left out in the cold. […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal story, “The ‘Democratization of Credit’ Is Over — Now It’s Payback Time,” is a solid piece of reporting on how credit that was once offered liberally to lower income consumers has now left a very big hangover. It’s worse than with other income strata for an obvious reason, namely, low income […]
Read more...Repeat after me: the credit crisis was the result of too much cheap and easy lending. Ergo, any return to healthier practices means more expensive and less readily available debt. The problem is that the powers that be don’t quite grasp the implications, or to the extent they do, are still trying to have their […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Why is everyone saying consumer credit is falling? It’s not. But, everywhere I look, everybody is saying it is. I would like to be true to the data and not just take the government’s seasonally-adjusted numbers at face value. Judge for yourself. Here’s the data: This is what […]
Read more...Wells Fargo is hardly alone in treating credit card customers badly. Whenever I run a post on credit cards, I get a raft of comments and e-mails about various bank misdeeds, which generally involve rate increases when the borrower is current and has not suffered a fall in his credit score. The other common complaint […]
Read more...Even though there has been an increasing level of revolutionary saber-rattling in comments, it’s hard to see what the outlet for the anger against the banking industry will be. The brief surge of letter-writing, e-mails, and calls to Congressmen to forestall the TARP proved useless. But Americans don’t go to the barricades or do general […]
Read more...This blog normally steers clear of the consumer finance space, except when it is amusing or has macroeconomic effects. But once in a while I cannot contain myself. Why does anyone have a debit card? I am deadly serious about this question. Not long ago, I switched banks, going from one end of the spectrum […]
Read more...Reuters reports that a number of credit card issuers reported modest improvement in their chargeoff rates for July. While any improvement is good news, it is way too early to break out the champagne. First, some of the improvement may be related to tax refunds being used to pay down debt, a strictly seasonal affair. […]
Read more...