Attention shoppers: Another credit card fee is here
(Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images file)
It could soon cost you more to shop with a credit card at some stores. As of this Sunday, Jan. 27, merchants who accept credit cards issued by Visa and MasterCard will be allowed to add a service charge to the purchase price.
Just don’t hold up a sign saying this or you could be arrested for felony terrorism and bank robbery.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren pledged to lead the Democratic effort on filibuster reform in the “first week in January” and suggested a new filibuster should look more like the traditional motion: A lawmaker should be required to defend his or her opposition to a bill on the Senate floor.
“On the first day of the new session in January, the senators will have a unique opportunity to change the filibuster rule with a majority vote, rather than the normal two-thirds vote. The change can be modest: If someone objects to a bill or a nomination in the United States Senate, they should have to stand on the floor of the chamber and defend their opposition,” she writes in a blog post published on the Huffington Post.
Send her your Support
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
Seven Banks Under Investigation for Global Interest Rate Scandal
Seven international banks have been served with subpoenas over the global interest setting scandal. Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS – have been asked to provide relevant “documents and communications” to Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney-general in collaboration with George Jepsen, Connecticut’s top law enforcement officer.
The scandal involves LIBOR – or the London Inter Bank Offer Rate – a global system of interest rates for $360 trillion in international deposits. While many of these loans are overnight transfers between banks, they affect the price of consumer loans like mortgages, car loans and credit card loans. The rates are set by the British Bankers Association which makes a considered average of rates reported to them verbally by participating bankers.
For several years, speculation has been rife that the numbers were being fixed. A 2008 study by the Bank for International Settlements noted that the rates could “be manipulated if contributor banks collude or if a sufficient number change their behaviour.” So did a paper published on the Social Science Research Network which found evidence of “questionable patterns.”
Last year news emerged that the European Commission, the U.K. Financial Services Authority, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating the matter.
“(T)he manipulation of submissions used to calculate those rates can have significant negative effects on consumers and financial markets worldwide,” said Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general of the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division.
In August 2011 the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and the Firefighters and Police Benefit Fund of the city of New Britain, Connecticut, sued 16 banks over the rate manipulation. Naomi Reice Buchwald, a federal judge in New York, appointed Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld and Arun Subramanian of Susman Godfrey to act as the lawyers for a potential class action lawsuit.
On June 27 Barclays became the first bank to be charged this past June when it was fined a record £290 million ($450 million) by U.S. and U.K. authorities.
In the following weeks subpoenas were served on a number of other banks in New York, under the Martin Act, a 1921 law, which allows the attorney general to investigate anyone doing business in New York that may have committed “deceitful practices contrary to the plain rules of common honesty.”
Meanwhile a number of other lawyers have jumped on the bandwagon. In July law firm Pomerantz Haudek Grossman & Gross filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of Berkshire Bank in July 2012. In August Brian Murray of law firm Murray Frank filed a lawsuit on behalf of investors in Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota and about 20 other states.
The banks are fighting back. In a motion to dismiss the original Baltimore lawsuit, a veritable who’s who of 16 top Wall street law firms stated: “(F)alse reporting (of interest rates) in and of itself is not alleged to be, and plainly is not, a competitive act, and does not restrain trade in any market. There are no buyers or sellers, no market, no profit, and no competition of any kind associated with the mere reporting of rates or setting of USD Libor.”
But experts say that it is high time that the LIBOR system was scrapped. “So long as big finance will do almost anything to goose its own profits and bonuses, self-regulation is a dangerous myth,” says Robert Schapiro, under secretary of commerce for economic affairs in the Clinton administration. “It should give way to sound law enforcement, which in economic terms is government regulation.”
(via randomactsofchaos)
Wall Street is just a collection of dickhead tools.
Sociopathic dickhead tools.
Education should not be a debt sentence. #StudentLoans #OWS
by Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.
It’s happening right now with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — passed two years ago in the wake of our disastrous financial meltdown. Just last week, for example, both parties in the House overwhelmingly approved two bills that already would change Dodd-Frank’s rules on derivatives — those convoluted trading deals recently described by the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as “the largest dark pool in our financial markets.”
Especially vulnerable is a key provision of Dodd-Frank known as the Volcker Rule, so named by President Obama after the former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. It’s an attempt to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling your savings on the bank’s own, sometime risky investments. […]A thick wallet helps, of course — lobbyists for the financial sector spent nearly half a billion dollars last year. And the congressional newspaper The Hill reports, “Members of Congress pressuring regulators to go easy on the ‘Volcker Rule’ received roughly four times as much on average in contributions from the financial industry than lawmakers pushing for a stronger rule since the 2010 election cycle, according to Public Citizen, a left-leaning group advocating for strict implementation.
“When it is all added up, opponents of a tough Volcker Rule received over 35 times as much from the financial industry — $66.7 million — than advocates for a strong stance, who received $1.9 million.” […]All of which demonstrates, as per Bloomberg News, “that four years after Wall Street helped cause the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and prompted a $700 billion taxpayer bailout, its lobby is regaining its power to blunt or deflect efforts to rein in the banks.”
(via silas216)
