naked capitalism

Mara says:

Conversely (to the above statement), a “good” credit score is no longer valuable, since banks are cutting back so severely on extending credit. This stop on credit is “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” in that perfectly good credit risks are being denied, but the banks still have their bad risks on their books. That is a great way to extend your earnings slump if you’re a bank/cc company.
Of course, draconian interest rates, “Universal Protection Clauses” and other acts of cruelty have precipitated defaults. Once the value of good credit was diminished, the value of paying off unsecured debt at criminally usurious rate became nearly worthless. And with so many defaults, the cc companies don’t have the admin infrastructure to chase up all of the defaults to pay up. They will have to accept partial payoffs to get bad debt off the books, or there will end up being a further scandal of the cc companies misreporting their “current” vs “delinquent” accounts to keep up the share prices. Any bets on when that will happen?

David says:

Yves and all, yet another great post. I like the gentle digs about lack of oversight and regulation of interest rates….or rather profiteering w/o productive endeavors by the financial sector. Hopefully we can return ‘creativity’ to engineering and the arts and bring back a quaint ‘responsibility’ to the financial sector. I am in neither sector and sadly have to fly out west to see my dying father and Delta wouldn’t change our tickets to a new date w/o a 200 percent increase in price (twice the cost of just buying a new ticket…) so this gouging is pretty much a general trend. I bought another ticket from another airlines and we’ll keep the other date for another visit.

Also, I did comment a couple days back on your appearance on that WBUR show w/ tom Ashcroft and you mentioned that you thought it was one-sided but remembering I thought the main participant did write a semi-famous article “Dan Quayle was right..” so perhaps she was ‘conservative’, (Ms. Whitehead). In general, the show is very balanced as NPR requires, but a more recent show was pretty damning yet again of the anti-regulatory crowd esp. after the artificial buildup in oil futures which are driving up costs of living relative to the era of “moderation”, in his recent show Tom seems to be finding more human interest coinciding with less conservative commentators it seems as there were some excellent guests this week esp. two young Republicans demanding a repackageing of the brand for ‘working class’ folks (like myself in the middle of the ’squeeze’). Even that was like comedy more than ‘balance’. Truth can be ‘one-sided’ at times. The general drift of things is that the house of cards built by the anti-regulatory conservative power elite is falling. Trouble is, we in the middle class are seeing as a result lifetime of toil never ending: I’ll be working ’til I drop. (but one good thing, we’re going to lose weight and probably be healthier as a result..ignoring the stress!)

Some encouragement our way is appreciated and I enjoy your creative choice of links and photos of pets which make me smile. Thx!

I myself use only my debit card…but now some retailers are stopping the use of that perhaps due to overcharges by the same credit companies. For the first time I was limited to only 35 dollars for gas at a station on a debit card. I had to pay the balance in cash. Never had that happen before. And American Express is being dropped by small retailers for the same overcharges too.