I’ve recounted my own sorry experience with Chase, in which branch staff repeatedly misrepresented its business checking product. I’ve closed that account, but Chase nevertheless managed to extract some fees on a supposedly “fee free” account. Another example of Chase’s aggressive and less than upstanding conduct comes from a reader via e-mail: I have been […]
Read more...Bloomberg provides a summary of a report by Morgan Stanley that has tried to quantify the level of strategic defaults. The analysis seeks to identify borrowers who walk away from mortgages that they can arguably afford, and defines that group as those who go from paying on time to missing three mortgage payments in a […]
Read more...Andrew Dittmer, who was an important collaborator on ECONNED, sent me pdfs of the notorious Citigroup Plutonomy reports for leisure reading. Michael Moore highlighted these two research reports (2005 and 2006) in Capitalism: A Love Story . On the one hand, the authors, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh get some credit for addressing […]
Read more...By Tim Duncan, Chairman of American Business Leaders for Financial Reform Financial regulatory reform was starting to feel a lot like a political version of the movie Groundhog Day. Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie – forced inexplicably to live the same day over and over until he learned from his mistakes – the […]
Read more...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 […]
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