(Wall Street Journal) — Big banks may soon start pushing a different type of plastic to their customers. Financial institutions such as U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. are exploring prepaid cards as a way to make up revenue that will likely be lost from federal restrictions on debit cards. That is because […]
(Wall Street Journal) — The U.S. Federal Reserve unveiled an online consumers’ guide to credit scores and credit reports. The straight-forward guide includes the basics: What a credit score is, how it is used and why it is important to protect your credit history. But what is perhaps more significant is what that guide is meant […]
(Washington Post) — For $2 trillion, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may buy little improvement in growth, employment or inflation over the next two years. Firms with large-scale models of the U.S. economy such as IHS Global Insight, Moody’s Analytics Inc. and Macroeconomic Advisers LLC project only a moderate impact from additional Fed asset […]
(New York Times) — Did the proliferation of low-down-payment, low-documentation loans cause the housing bubble? Last week, I discussed one core problem with answering that question — we don’t really know what happened to approval rates or loan-to-value levels over time. But let’s assume that we did know, and that loan-to-value ratios increased by 5 […]
(Smart Money) — Investors may not reserve judgment. Bank of America and Citigroup are among the companies scheduled to release their quarterly results Friday. JPMorgan Chase was the first to release its earnings, beating Wall Street estimates as it wrote bad loans off its books. However, chief executive Jamie Dimon said returns in the firm’s […]
(New York Times) — The chairman of the Federal Reserve urged banks and regulators on Monday to help the nation’s small businesses get the loans they needed to create jobs. He also acknowledged that economists could not agree on why such lending has contracted substantially over the last two years. Small businesses — those having fewer than […]
(NY Times) — As part of its continuing efforts to carry out the credit card legislation that President Obama signed last year, the Federal Reserve announced a few new tweaks today. First, late fees, which may run $39 or so today, can no longer be any higher than $25, with a couple of exceptions. One of those exceptions […]
(USA Today) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday moved to ease market jitters over financial turmoil in Europe, suggesting that any harm to the U.S. economy should be “modest” and that there may even be a few benefits. Bernanke also told the House Budget Committee that the nation’s economic recovery is likely to […]
(New York Times) — At a moment when many economists warn that the American economic recovery is likely to be imperiled by prolonged high unemployment and slow growth, President Obama is discovering that the tools available to him last year — a big economic stimulus and action by the Federal Reserve — are both now politically untenable. […]
(TheNation.com) — “The Fed can no longer operate in virtual secrecy,” declared Vermont independent Bernie Sanders Tuesday after the Senate voted 96-0 to add his “Audit the Fed” amendment to the financial regulatory reform bill. The Senate amendment is not as muscular as the bipartisan legislation backed by the House, which was sponsored by Florida […]
(HuffingtonPost.com) — Federal regulators are opposing a proposed $1.4 billion tax refund for JPMorgan Chase & Co. The tax benefit has become an issue a year and a half after the Wall Street titan galloped in to buy the assets of Washington Mutual Inc. when it collapsed under bad mortgage loans and became the biggest bank […]
(Fortune) — What’s good for America isn’t necessarily good for all Americans. The case in point: low interest rates. The government has cut short-term rates (which the Federal Reserve controls) to essentially zero, and has spent more than $1.5 trillion buying assets and mortgages to hold down long-term rates (which are controlled by the financial […]