Posts by Mary Kane

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

During the summer, when swine flu was not yet a widespread reality in the United States, giant retailer Wal-Mart made the news for being in talks with the government about possibly distributing the swine flu vaccine through its extensive network of stores.
But now the swine flu has Wal-Mart under scrutiny for a very different reason: [...]

Just as we wrote about the pressing need for financial literacy among consumers as credit tightens, The New York Times reports on the government’s efforts to combat those “free” credit report firms, which charge people for a service they are entitled to get for free.
On television it’s hard to miss the wildly popular band of [...]

In response to a recent TWI report, the nation’s leading financial literacy group has launched an investigation into its conflict-of-interest policies.

The foreclosure crisis has taken a turn in California’s wealthy Marin County, according to Miriam Alex-Lute at Rooflines. Marin residents waged a legal fight a few years back to keep out Habitat for Humanity, the charitable group that builds houses for low-income buyers. But now that abandoned, foreclosed houses are showing up in Marin, Lute [...]

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported.
The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum [...]

It’s a big day for banks: The Obama administration is expected to unveil new “too big to fail” proposals for dealing with troubled financial giants, Reuters reports. The proposals would “give the government the power to dismantle large financial companies that get into crises.”
The new draft bill is expected to take a tougher stance toward [...]

As we noted on Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee is in the midst of tackling financial regulatory reform, which has brought out the lobbyists in full force. Here’s just a small taste of the action so far: American Banker is reporting that the committee is close to carving out an exemption for community banks [...]

What seemed like a clear path ahead was upstaged by the health care battle.

When is this ever going to end? Conservative lawmakers are seizing on ACORN’s troubles to once again go after the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law that somehow became a scapegoat for the housing crisis last year, the AP reports.
The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was intended to end redlining, a practice in which banks in [...]