A Wall Street Journal story, “Payday Lenders Strike a Defensive Pose,” discussed the growing Congressional interest in restricting payday lending, and the attempts by the industry to clean up its act around the margin. By any standard, payday lending is predatory lending. Typical terms are $15 for every $100 borrowed for two weeks. That’s 390% […]
Read more...Mirable dictu, a Wall Street Journal editorial, “How Expansions Die,” that, for the most part, has a solid foundation in reality. Although the WSJ’s news pages have been reporting on the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market (admittedly somewhat less intently than the Financial Times), both the news and editorial pages have treated it as […]
Read more...That’s what the Wall Street Journal told us yesterday in its first-page story,”Bank of America Casts Wider Net for Hispanics.” The bank, now the nation’s largest issuer of credit cards thanks to its acquisition of MBNA, is quietly rolling out a program to provide credit cards to illegal immigrants. I don’t have a problem with […]
Read more...The Financial Times reported today on a spike up in the ABX index, a means to buy and sell default insurance on mortgage-backed bonds rated BBB- (the very bottom of investment grade bonds) are now trading at nearly 1000 basis points, up from 650 a week ago, a dramatic increase. The reason? More bad news […]
Read more...We’ve commented in past posts on the relatively new-found freedom of banks to charge interest rates that once would have been deemed usurious, the further sop of an overly-creditor-friendly bankruptcy bill, and the efforts of the Pentagon to push back against some of the lenders’ more extreme practices, namely products that carry interest rates of […]
Read more...Usury is becoming a hot topic. We posted on it a few days ago; it is also featured in a January 13 New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Banks Gone Wild” by Joe Lee and Thomas Parrish, which was then picked up in the blogsphere by Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View. From the Times: I owe about […]
Read more...When the Pentagon is sticking its nose in an area this far from its native (and very large) sphere of influence, you know something is up. From Reuters: The Pentagon is writing a rule to keep the minds of U.S. troops on their missions by shielding them from debt, but the prospect of the Defense […]
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