(Examiner) – Mitt Romney showed the size of his largess when after losing the election he cut off funding to the credit cards for thousands of his staffers, leaving some stranded and without a revenue source. Read the rest of this entry »

(Fox) – The Department of Justice is reportedly deciding whether to charge banks over growing LIBOR interest rate fixes. The international investment bank Barclays Capital has already paid $450 million in fines for illegally manipulating the rates that banks charge each other to borrow money. That rate affects everything from credit cards to car loans and mortgage rates. Shepard Smith reported that it remains to be seen whether Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner knew about the rate manipulation when he was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Read the rest of this entry »

(ActivistPost) – I wrote an article a while back titled 5 Reasons NOT to Pay Your Credit Cards. Understandably, many e-mails came in asking, “But what happens if I don’t pay?”

Just as the Mafia has their collections department, so do the banks. A Mafia enforcer might employ a pipe to the knee, threats to your family, or other nefarious means of collecting debts for the boss. Much the same, collections agencies use guilt, the credit rating system, threats of legal action, and many tools of harassment and deceit from their bag of tricks. Read the rest of this entry »

(WebOfDebt) – The stock market shot up on September 13, after new banking regulations were announced called Basel III.  Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief.  The megabanks, propped up by generous taxpayer bailouts, would have no trouble meeting the new capital requirements, which were lower than expected and would not be fully implemented until 2019.  Only the local commercial banks, the ones already struggling to meet capital requirements, would be seriously challenged by the new rules.  Unfortunately, these are the banks that make most of the loans to local businesses, which do most of the hiring and producing in the real economy.  The Basel III capital requirements were ostensibly designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 banking collapse, but the new rules fail to address its real cause.  Read the rest of this entry »

Toxic debts racked up by banks and insurers could spiral to $4 trillion (£2.7 trillion), new forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are set to suggest. Read the rest of this entry »

In America’s earliest days, there were barn-raising parties in which neighbors helped each other build up their farms. Today, in some churches, there are debt liquidation revivals in which parishioners chip in to free each other from growing credit card debts that are driving American families to bankruptcy and desperation. IN DEBT WE TRUST is the latest film from Danny Schechter, “The News Dissector,” director of the internationally distributed and award-winning WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), an expose of the media’s role in the Iraq War. The Emmy-winning former ABC News and CNN producer’s new hard-hitting documentary investigates why so many Americans are being strangled by debt.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Reuters reports:

“No doubt, we’ve got three or four years here that are going to be very tough,” Gates told the eclectic gathering of industry executives and business leaders [at TED]. “We’re going through a period … where a 50-year credit expansion has moved to contraction. You’re going to have a number of years where aggregate demand is low,” he said.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times recently reported on page one that credit cards may be the next to go in the financial crisis. Danny Schechter published this similar warning last June in City Beat, a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles.

You thought the housing crisis was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to tell you, but the storm has reached your location and it is a Category 5 hurricane. The levees are leaking. Ignore it at your own peril. The 6,000 sq ft McMansion buying, BMW leasing, $5 Starbucks latte drinking, granite countertop upgrading, home equity borrowing days are coming to an end. The American consumer will not go without a fight. For the last seven years the American consumer has carried the weight of the world on its shoulders. This has been a heavy burden, but when you take steroids it doesn’t seem so heavy. The steroid of choice for the American consumer has been debt. Read the rest of this entry »

shows how the mall replaced the factory as America’s dominant economic engine and how big banks and credit card companies buy our Congress and drive us into what a former major bank economist calls modern serfdom. Read the rest of this entry »