NorCalUrban

Time reports on "Exposing the Credit Card Fine Print" To credit-card companies, it's not sufficient that customers pay their bills on time every month; they must also avoid a daunting array of borrowing habits that lenders deem risky. Like borrowing. Katie Groves, 42, learned this firsthand when the annual interest rate on her Chase Visa bill jumped to 29.99%—from the previous 12%. Although she had never missed a payment and owed only $500, she was told that her rate had increased because Chase had checked her credit report. Most consumers are unaware that the banks constantly monitor all their borrowing behavior. Even if you just get too close to your borrowing limit (a figure you probably don't know) on your cards and mortgages, as Groves did, you can trigger what the industry calls universal default. Interesting article. There seems to be little or no relief coming to our country. With the low income class being stretched by a lack of health insurance, falling wage...

At the Sojourners  website, author Danny Schechter has an interesting comments about the current mortgage meltdown, the forces that drove the crisis and the dramatic impact on the broader market and the eventually on the poor. He writes:  "How was this allowed to happen? These days, instead of holding onto mortgages they make, most banks sell them to Wall Street. There, prominent firms make millions recycling mortgages into securities and other exotic financial instruments, often using them to provide financing for even bigger deals—and sanctioning the unrestrained greed and unregulated chicanery of the predatory lending industry. It became a classic “the emperor has no clothes” story when it was revealed that many of those “asset-backed securities” had no real assets behind them. Suddenly, the paper proved worthless and the markets panicked. Soon there was a “crisis of liquidity” in financial circles, as it became clear that bad deals had been funded by bad debts. That’s where we...