As of July 1, the Federal Reserve will require that banks obtain a customer’s consent before they can charge them overdraft fees for A.T.M. transactions and debit purchases; many banks now automatically enroll customers.
In anticipation of the new Fed rule, some banks have begun marketing campaigns to encourage their customers to opt in to overdraft [...]
Obama must now prime the pump to get us out of a multi-pronged mess left over from the Bush crowd and seven years of Republican control. Republicans chose to look the other way and ignore the financial chicanery going on right in front of them, while the income gap between the very wealthy and average [...]
Filed in Essays, News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al Franken, Capitalism, Debt, Deficit, Economy, Financial Sector, Free Market, Jobs, Middle Class, Obstructionism, Reform, Regulation, Republicans, Safety Net, Trickle Down, Unemployment
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Sunday, February 21, 2010
“When I see that I owe $160,000 on almost a $350,000 home and somebody decides they want to take it — I wasn’t gonna stand for that so I took it down.” – Terry Hoskins, Moscow, Ohio
Monday, February 15, 2010
There has been widespread public anger against the hubris of the banks, who are regarded as being to blame for the financial crisis. Their bonus policies, which have persisted even after the system has been bailed out by the taxpayer, have been attacked by politicians and the media. But what I can’t understand is why [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
Can someone shut these banking industry narcissists up?
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The industry’s inability to see, much less admit, any culpability, and hence the need for root and branch reform, is pathological. The reaction of the bank chiefs, at least as depicted by Schwarzman, is utter denial. It’s as if someone who drove his car at 150 miles an [...]
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can’t make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection [...]
By bailing out the markets, we only subsidized the foolishness that created the disaster in the first place. The incompetents were allowed to keep their jobs. And not only keep their jobs—they reaped huge rewards.
Worse, by playing up the “response to crisis” view of the bail out—think about all of the discussion around Bernanke’s performance—we [...]
The worst of the bad guys, nearly everyone agrees, are the so-called Big Six: JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Experts believe the first four alone hold at least 40 percent of our nation’s deposits and half of all bank assets.
But despite ANWF’s nationwide rallies — which remained [...]
You’ve heard plenty about the big banks’ role in the Great Recession, but their headaches are about to get worse.
At a packed hearing today, the Senate investigations subcommittee led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) shed new light on banks’ negligence and wrongdoing—and this time it’s not credit-default swaps or derivatives but money laundering and arms dealers. The [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Angola, Bailouts, Bank of America, Carl Levin, Citibank, Corporatism, Corruption, Crime, Financial Sector, Great Recession, HSBC, Lobbyists, Money Laundering, Senate, Shell Corporations
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
In the grand tradition of his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is generating tons of publicity by whacking Wall Street with a big fat stick. But even if you are predisposed to dismiss the civil fraud suit his office filed Thursday against former Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis and former chief [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged AIG, Bailouts, Bonuses, Christopher Dodd, Congress, Corporatism, Executive Compensation, Financial Sector, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Lobbyists, Reform, Senate
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
The 325-page report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which will conduct a hearing on Thursday, sheds new light on how banks like Citigroup, Wachovia and Bank of America unwittingly shifted hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of African politicians, their relatives and associates.
The banks ended up closing or restricting the accounts and cooperated [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Bailouts, Bank of America, Carl Levin, Citigroup, Corporatism, Corruption, Financial Sector, Fraud, Money Laundering, PEP, Regulation, Shell Corporations, Wachovia
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Exposing this entirely legal labyrinth of ownership took years of interagency pick-and-ax work. In the end it demonstrated how nefarious activity — even as high profile as this — can go on for years, right under authorities’ noses. It’s also meant that tenants of the prestigious Manhattan property have been paying millions in rent to [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Alavi Foundation, Bank Melli, Business, Cayman Islands, Corporatism, Corruption, Delaware, Drug Trafficking, Financial Secrecy, Financial Sector, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, IMF, Iran, Law, Money Laundering, Offshore Banking, Panama, Semion Mogilevich, Shell Companies, Shell Corporations, Sinaloa, Switzerland, Tax Evasion, Tax Havens, Terrorism Funding, Transparency, Victor Bout
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Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts.
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The singer Billy Bragg has reiterated calls for bonuses at RBS to be capped as he prepared to withhold his [...]
Last week started with a conference in Montreal, called by a group of governments and international agencies calling themselves Friends of Haiti, to discuss the long and short term needs of the recently devastated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rubble and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled [...]
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