banks
SunwestTrust.com: Friends and Family Loan Mortgage Program : Social Personal Peer Lending
http://www.SunwestTrust.com – 800-642-7167. You probably have heard about the national credit crisis. During this time of national crisis have you ever considered becoming a bank? That’s right; you can become a bank for a friend or family member.
Duration : 0:2:41
UK chip and pin credit / debit cards are insecure (11Feb10)
A not totally unsurprising development from those that look at security, the supposedly secure chip and pin facility in UK credit and debit cards is easily broken and fraudulent transactions are easily made. Unsurprisingly, the useless UK banks say it’s not our problem. The chip and pin system was designed to offload blame for fraud onto the customer away from the banks that enable the fraud in the first place. And now with RFID in UK credit and debit cards, fraud will be even easier and impossible to dispute.
Recorded from Newsnight, 11 February 2010.
Duration : 0:9:58
Eurozone debt ‘the biggest threat to UK stability’
Bank of England Governor Mervyn King says the biggest threat to UK banks’ financial stability is the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Duration : 0:1:44
Humes Expects `Some Form of Reprofiling’ of Greek Debt
June 20 (Bloomberg) — Hans Humes, president of Greylock Capital Management, discusses Greece’s debt crisis and the prospects for restructuring its debt.
He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Duration : 0:3:28
Mettler Expects Greek Debt Restructuring From September
June 9 (Bloomberg) — Ann Mettler, executive director and co-founder of the Lisbon Council, talks about the outlook for a Greek debt restructuring and for deeper fiscal integration in the euro zone.
She speaks from Vienna with Maryam Nemazee on Bloomberg Television’s “The Pulse.”
Duration : 0:5:23
Holtz-Eakin Urges Obama to Take Lead on Debt Solution
June 9 (Bloomberg) — Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, and Joseph Minarik, senior vice president and director of research at the Committee for Economic Development, talk about the U.S. debt ceiling and the need for bipartisan cooperation on fiscal policy.
Any U.S. debt default would be very serious and the government should stop playing with fire, said Li Daokui, an adviser to the People’s Bank of China, according to a Reuters report. Holtz-Eakin and Minarik speak with Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Duration : 0:7:29
Credit Cards on Campus – How Banks Skirt The Law
A law that went into effect last year was supposed to curtail the use of credit cards on campus. But did it work?
Duration : 0:1:26
Fischer Says European Debt Crisis Is ‘Manageable’
May 25 (Bloomberg) — Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer talks about the next leader of the International Monetary Fund and the possibility of a Greek debt restructuring.
He speaks from Paris with Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua.
Duration : 0:10:52
Gross Says Geithner Gave U.S. Debt Limit `Wiggle Room’
May 16 (Bloomberg) — Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., talks about U.S. budget policy and the debt limit.
Gross, speaking on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness with Margaret Brennan,” also discusses European sovereign debt crises and Federal Reserve policy. (Source: Bloomberg)
Duration : 0:13:52
PBS Frontline Secret History of the Credit Card
In “Secret History of the Credit Card,” FRONTLINE® and The New York Times join forces to investigate an industry few Americans fully understand. In this one-hour report, correspondent Lowell Bergman uncovers the techniques used by the industry to earn record profits and get consumers to take on more debt.
“The almost magical convenience of plastic money is critical to our famously compulsive consumer economy,” Bergman says. “With more than 641 million credit cards in circulation and accounting for an estimated $1.5 trillion of consumer spending, the U.S. economy has clearly gone plastic.”
Millions of American families use their personal, general-purpose credit cards such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover to make ends meet; credit cards have been a discreet lifeline for families in financial straits.
But other consumers, like actor and author Ben Stein, use plastic purely for convenience. While it would appear that Stein — who says he charges a small fortune every month on his credit cards — is the ideal customer, in reality, he is what some in the industry call a “deadbeat.” That’s because he pays his balance in full every month.
The industry’s most profitable customers, the ones being sought by creative marketing tactics, are the “revolvers:” the estimated 115 million Americans who carry monthly credit card debt.
Ed Yingling, incoming president of the American Bankers Association, tells FRONTLINE that revolvers are “the sweet spot” of the banking industry. This “sweet spot” continues to grow as the average credit card debt among American households has more than doubled over the past decade. Today, the average family owes roughly $8,000 on their credit cards. This debt has helped generate record profits for the credit card industry — last year, more than $30 billion before taxes.
Some experts say the profitability of credit cards really began twenty-five years ago, when the banking industry successfully eliminated a critical restriction: the limit on the interest rate a lender can charge a borrower. Deregulation, coupled with a revolution in technology that enables the almost real-time tracking of personal financial information and the emergence of nationwide banking, has facilitated the widening availability of credit cards across the economic spectrum. But for some, the cost of credit is often far greater than it appears.
According to Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, the credit card companies are misleading consumers and making up their own rules. “These guys have figured out the best way to compete is to put a smiley face in your commercials, a low introductory rate, and hire a team of MBAs to lay traps in the fine print,” Warren tells FRONTLINE.
Warren and other critics say that a growing share of the industry’s revenues come from what they call deceptive tactics, such as “default” terms spelled out in the fine print of cardholder agreements — the terms and conditions of which can be changed at any time for any reason with 15 days’ notice.
Penalty fees and rates are sometimes triggered by just a single lapse — a payment that arrives a couple of days or even hours late, a charge that exceeds the credit line by a few dollars, or a loan from another creditor which renders the cardholder “overextended” as defined by the nation’s three all-powerful credit bureaus. This flurry of unexpected fees and rate hikes come just when consumers can least afford them.
“[Banks are] raising interest rates, adding new fees, making the due date for your payment a holiday or a Sunday on the hopes that maybe you’ll trip up and get a payment in late,” says Robert McKinley, founder and chairman of Cardweb.com and Ram Research, a payment card research firm. “It’s become a very anti-consumer marketplace.”
Banking Association spokesman Yingling defends industry practices. Because the credit card business is basically unsecured lending, he says, the risks associated with the business must be offset.
But that’s of little consolation to consumers who may be in trouble. According to the Better Business Bureau, credit card and banking companies are the subject of a record numbers of complaints. “It’s not an accident that the banking and credit card business generates more complaints nationally, across the country, than any other industry…Out of one thousand industries that we track, they are number one,” says Pat Wallace, head of the San Francisco Bay Area Better Business Bureau. “There are irritated, unhappy, dissatisfied customers in this industry.”
As Professor Warren sees it, the industry is operating without fear of penalty. “There’s no regulator, and there’s no customer who can bring this industry to heel,” Warren says.
Duration : 0:56:9
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