The NY Times, after 25 years of turning a blind eye, finally explains how the banks got blood from a stone.
In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made.
Lenders have found new ways to squeeze more profit from borrowers. Though prevailing interest rates have fallen to the low single digits in recent years, for example, the rates that credit card issuers routinely charge even borrowers with good credit records have risen, to 19.1 percent last year from 17.7 percent in 2005 — a difference that adds billions of dollars in interest charges annually to credit card bills.
Average late fees rose to $35 in 2007 from less than $13 in 1994, and fees charged when customers exceed their credit limits more than doubled to $26 a month from $11, according to CardWeb, an online publisher of information on payment and credit cards.
Mortgage lenders similarly added or raised fees associated with borrowing to buy a home — like $75 e-mail charges, $100 document preparation costs and $70 courier fees — bringing the average to $700 a mortgage, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These “junk fees” have risen 50 percent in recent years, said Michael A. Kratzer, president of FeeDisclosure.com, a Web site intended to help consumers reduce fees on mortgages.
“Today the focus for lenders is not so much on consumer loans being repaid, but on the loan as a perpetual earning asset,” said Julie L. Williams, chief counsel of the Comptroller of the Currency, in a March 2005 speech that received little notice at the time.
Now do you get it? They hook you, then they bleed you dry. That's the intent. Your banker is NOT your friend.
Meanwhile, the Bush Depression moves into Europe, and Google is in trouble on Wall Street because it made less than 35% profit!!!! In a runaway capitalist society, 35% isn't enough.
Then there's John McCain, preparing for life after he loses the election by fawning over GM's hypothetical electric car and lying to workers' faces.
(More links after the jump)
Medical schools start doctors studying art as a way of getting them to look at their patients.
"Consistency in the pursuit of empire is no virtue." Thomas Nephew lets Fred Hiatt have it right between the eyes.
The question isn’t whether Obama (or McCain) are “foolishly” consistent about how to conduct the mission in Iraq in the face of some changed conditions. The question is whether having U.S. troops in Iraq was, is, or ever will be in our country’s best interest. And whether the Post likes it or not, that question was answered “no” a long time ago.
As Senator Obama noted, “What’s missing in our debate is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq.” And the Post’s reply to that is telling (emphases added):
Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.
Largest oil reserves? That’s funny, last I checked invading Iraq was all about the central front in the war on terror. Before that it was freedom, democracy, and all that jazz. Before that it was Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Before that it was Saddam’s nonexistent ties to Bin Laden. (Remember Bin Laden?)
But even on the Post’s realpolitik premise, they’re wrong. First, Iraqis will remain eager to sell us as much oil as we’re stupid enough to have to buy. Second, broadly speaking, when the United States finds itself “doing counterinsurgency,” we’ve already screwed up. That’s what we’ve been doing in Iraq: American troops killing whoever’s killing them back that month, on behalf of a mission that changes from one six month unit to the next.
(all emphasis in the original)
BTW and FYI, Thom, Michael Gerson has joined Fred as a WaPo editorial writer and their styles are almost identical. So otoh you may be castigating the wrong pinhead but otoh what difference does it make if you criticize Tweedledum when Tweedledee is the perp? 6 of 1, half-dozen etc.
For Holy Joe: Paintings of greenhead flies. (Unfortunately, no pictures.)
The work of an immigrant-hater never stops.
It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.
By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.
After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.
***
Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.
“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”
What makes you think they want to, Mr Ramos? They may have sold it as a crime-fighting measure but was it ever intended to do anything other than give them a way to throw immigrants in jail?
THE DIGITAL AGE: William Butler Yeats as an electronic pop-up.
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