Category Archives: Credit cards

Families Drowning in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class

Young people with pretty high incomes are sinking under debt.

Banks Again Hoist on Their Cost-Cutting Petard: Burgeoning Credit Card Fraud

Credit card companies are paying for their stinginess via being exposed to rapidly rising levels of fraud.

Facebook’s Finance Fantasy Island Dreams

Facebook wants to become a big payments system player. Good luck with that.

Why You Should Back the Sanders/AOC Plan to Cap Credit Card Interest Rates at 15%, Re-Launch the Postal Savings Bank

A new bill by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seeks to limit credit abuses and make banking more accessible.

War on Cash: UK’s First Till-Free Grocery Store

War on cash- issues and complications undermine business case for till-free stores.

FIS and Worldpay’s Merger – Why Its “Bank in a Box” Tech Fantasy Will Go Nowhere

FIS and Worldpay are merging, hyping that they’ll be a bank in a box. Clive looks under the hood and doen’t like what he sees.

Wolf Richter: The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q3 2018

Consumer debt continues to grind upwards.

Michael Hudson: 10 Years Since Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy – Did the Economy Really Recover?

Michael Hudson discusses the economic impact of not writing down debts in the wake of the crisis.

Don Quijones: Credit-Cardholders & Bank Customers Burned Again as New IT Chaos Breaks Out in the UK

Another IT outage in the UK serves as pushback to the war on cash, with even the ECB conceding it doesn’t foresee a totally cashless society, leaves those relying on credit cards alone to make payments vulnerable.

America’s Subprime Economy

This so-called expansion is more and more brought to you by subprime borrowings.

Don Quijones: Consumers Stubbornly Cling to Cash, after Multiple IT Fiascos & Payment Systems Outages

More consumer pushback in the war on cash: An industry dogged by non-believers who fret about privacy and fraud.

Wall Street Journal Hyping Amazon Banking: “Ridiculous, Ridiculous, Ridiculous”

The Wall Street Journal gets itself duped into publishing some particularly flaky, um, nebulous, um, aspirational Amazon banking ideas.

FinTech and Banks

Why FinTech will not be as disruptive as its promoters would have you believe.

PayPal Demonstrates What Happens to Former Tech Unicorns Which Get Lame

PayPal is no longer getting away with the sort of things it could as a payment processor newbie.