We are now full-on into the mad rush of the busiest shopping season of the year and retail sales are expected to reach a record breaking $75 billion just from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. But can we really afford all of these purchases? Or are we being lured into an endless credit card debt trap that will take the rest of the year — or longer — to pay off the interest and fees and charges?
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has just gotten approval from the National Futures Association (NFA) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to become the first exchange to buy and sell commodities with and for the same customers who trade on its exchange.
Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered the largest credit union in the United States to stop charging its customers illegal overdraft fees. Navy Federal Credit Union has been ordered to refund $80 million back to its customers, many of whom are active duty servicemembers, veterans, and Department of Defense civilian employees. Additionally, the credit union must pay a $15 million penalty to the agency’s victims relief fund.
Last month’s settlement agreement with Invitation Homes confirms what their tenants have been telling us: our country’s largest landlord of single family homes has a consistent track record of ripping off its tenants.
Crypto tycoons are storming into U.S. politics and attempting to reshape how we choose our elected officials. And the industry remains mostly controlled by a small group of very wealthy people even though fewer than one-sixth of people have ever owned any cryptocurrency. But crypto tycoons are pouring money into politics, aiming to bypass regulatory oversight, consolidate their power, and restructure American politics for their own benefit.
Rethinking Remittances When Changing a Little Changes a Lot The United States is one of the top sources of remittances in the world, with $79.15 billion in remittances sent to family and friends outside the country in 2022 alone. Despite this huge volume, the costs
Con artists are increasingly turning to cryptocurrency in scams that target older people, accelerating the already surging elder fraud in the United States. Cryptocurrency’s role in elder fraud is exploding, costing older people billions of dollars annually, emptying retirement funds, life savings and the ability to cover daily expenses or enjoy their retirement.
Cryptocurrency promises a high-tech opportunity to make buckets of money, but like most get-rich-quick schemes, rip-offs are ubiquitous. The crypto industry is rife with scams, hustles akin to stock swindles, cyberbreaches, and other crimes that can easily separate investors and consumers from their money.
Last week, a New Jersey court ruled that a couple who had been seriously injured in an accident riding in an Uber forfeited their right to sue Uber because their 12-year-old had clicked on a pop-up box in order to track her Uber Eats pizza order a year earlier. The food delivery app contained a forced arbitration clause that the court said invalidated their right to hold Uber accountable in court.
Problems are brewing in a scheme that is bigger than the Australian economy and almost completely without federal oversight. It is called private credit — large scale lending, but not by banks — and has surged from less than $300 billion in loans in 2013 to over $2.1 trillion globally today. This unregulated market has become yet another tool for the private equity industry to pursue leveraged buyouts and leaves target companies on the hook to repay the new mountains of debt. If this large pool of unregulated loans go sour, the distress could spread into the broader financial system, including traditional banks, and pose systemic risk to the financial system.