banks

After years of lively debate and partisan wrangling, sweeping new protections for credit card users are law. President Obama on Friday attached his signature to the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights, which prohibits rate hikes on most existing balances and provides borrowers a wider window to pay their bills.
Most of the reforms will go [...]

The headlines about stress tests released Thursday seemed sort of reassuring, after all the concern about the banking system going under. Ten banks need more capital but the others are safe. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made a point of declaring that none are insolvent. Everyone should breathe easier.
But in the financial blogosphere, many aren’t [...]

An investigation out today from the Center for Public Integrity details the nearly $370 million spent by top subprime lenders over the past decade to fend off regulation in Washington. While that’s disturbing enough, the study make clear that some of the major banks being bailed out by taxpayers were hardly victims of those subprime [...]

Paul Krugman raises a point worth thinking about as you hear more about stress test results for banks, which are expected to be publicly disclosed on Thursday. Why have so many of the results already been leaked — and who is doing the leaking? For example, we’ve known since last week that Citigroup and Bank [...]

Bank employees may not be digging into their pockets to make campaign contributions they way they used to, as Elana reports today, but those pockets are apparently becoming deep as they were during Wall Street’s boom times. According to The New York Times, Wall Street compensation is climbing again and may reach the same levels [...]

Some of the nation’s 19 largest banks have substantially reduced capital as a result of the recession and the mortgage crisis, the Federal Reserve’s stress tests show, according to Bloomberg. At the same time, most banks have more than enough reserves on hand to cover any potential losses, the Fed’s paper describing the stress tests [...]

It’s all credit cards, all day long. And Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Banking Committee went on MSNBC, this afternoon to reiterate his earlier call for the Federal Reserve to prevent credit card companies from hiking rates on existing balances — something Congress is now largely conceding it can’t do with [...]

We just put up a piece about how the Democrats’ legislative efforts to make credit cards more consumer friendly have been delayed, likely until July 2010, when new consumer protections crafted by the Federal Reserve will be installed anyway. It was probably inevitable that the banks would try to cash in on current practices as [...]

The Associated Press reported late Tuesday that recipients of Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout money are spending freely on lobbying Congress, while holding onto their government aid — but that’s not the whole story.
The AP noted that seven of the top 10 bailout beneficiaries spent more money on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 [...]

Even before she poses her first question to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner when he testifies before her panel for the first time today, expect Troubled Asset Relief Program oversight head Elizabeth Warren to come under fire. That’s because conservatives have been gunning for Warren, who was an outspoken advocate for consumers before she became chair [...]