We didn’t need another reason to love Elizabeth Warren.
But check out this Q&A the White House special adviser for consumer affairs did with Kiplinger Personal Finance. It appears in the magazine’s January 2011 issue.
In it, she lays out her very rational and reasonable goals for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she’s helping to establish [...]

The QE2 has been christened and set sail.
The Federal Reserve announced a second round of what’s called “quantitative easing” today, in a misguided effort to boost the economy by driving interest rates even lower.

The government-controlled bank will buy another $600 billion in long-term Treasuries — 2 ½ to 10-year bonds — over the next eight [...]

I was listening to Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Mad Money” last night, and for a guy who constantly extols the value of free markets he has sure bought into the Federal Reserve’s radical, market distorting policies.
Why?
Maybe it’s because the Fed’s campaign to drive interest rates down is intended to force savers out of safer [...]

The Federal Reserve seems determined to drive interest rates lower by purchasing another big chunk of government debt.
It hopes to make the already rock-bottom rates on Treasury bills and other long-term loans even lower on the questionable assumption that the lure of cheap money will make corporate America more likely to borrow, expand and hire.

The [...]

A new study shows the rich control a much larger portion of the nation’s wealth than we think they do – or should.
Two psychologists, Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael Norton of Harvard University, asked thousands of Americans how they think wealth in this country is distributed.

Respondents estimated that the wealthiest 20% of all [...]

The banking industry continues to cover itself in glory.
Last year I pointed out that efforts to modify unaffordable mortgages were failing because lenders refused to hire enough people to deal with all of their reckless loans.

Now it appears they also didn’t hire enough people to legally process all of the foreclosures created by their refusal [...]

In our endless search for the best returns we stumbled across a story that said banks are offering about 7.90% to 8.10% on 1-year CDs – in India.

That sounded pretty good since the average 12-month certificate of deposit is paying 0.56% in the United States.
But are the higher rates Indian savers earn being eaten up [...]

It used to take new owners at least a couple of months to decide whether they would honor the CDs they acquired from failed banks.
Now it’s only taking a couple of weeks.
A recent story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tells the story of Tom and Carol Spidell, who were customers of Maritime Savings Bank, which [...]

Banks are still whining about the so-called “skin-in-the-game” requirement that was part of the financial reform bill Congress passed last summer.
And I’ve got to say that those complaints are soooooo unattractive.
What the law does is require banks to maintain at least a 5% interest in the mortgages, credit card debt and auto loans they bundle [...]

There’s a breakthrough story on the front of today’s New York Times that finally acknowledges two big problems with the economy that we’ve been writing about for months.
First, I’ve been complaining about big companies hoarding cash since last summer.
Just last week Jen Stryker touched on the same theme, explaining why consumers can’t rescue this recovery, [...]

Two more banks in Florida and Washington were seized by regulators yesterday, pushing the total number of failed banks to 129 for the year.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. immediately sold their deposits and branches to new owners, which should have those offices reopened no later than Monday.
The failed banks are:
Wakulla Bank, of Crawfordville, Fla., which [...]

After Jen mentioned the economic stimulus bill in Tuesday’s post I thought it might be worthwhile to set the record straight about this unpopular effort to pull the country out of the recession.
The $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February 2009 divided that money in roughly equal thirds among:

Tax cuts for individuals and businesses.
Aid to [...]

I find it incredibly ironic that so many economists want to blame the painstakingly slow economic recovery on our refusal to spend more and save less.
These are often the same guys who, back during the housing and credit bubble of the early 2000s, were complaining that we should save more and spend less.
They probably had [...]

Two banks, one in Florida and another in Washington, were seized by regulators yesterday, pushing the total number of failed banks to 127 for the year.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. immediately sold their deposits and branches to new owners, which should have those offices reopened no later than Monday.
The failed banks are:
Haven Trust Bank Florida, [...]

Oh great.
The Wall Street Journal editorial pages agree with me.
The president’s gambit to make Elizabeth Warren the de-facto leader of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without Senate confirmation is a bad idea.

Of course the Journal is the financial industry’s ultimate apologist and comes to that conclusion from a completely different point of view than [...]

Another six banks were seized by regulators yesterday, pushing the total number of failed banks to 125 for the year.
The failed banks were in four states – New Jersey, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin – and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. immediately sold their deposits and branches to other banks.
Those branches will reopen no later than [...]

No. No. No.
President Barack Obama is appointing consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren to be special adviser overseeing the creation of a new consumer protection bureau, but he’s not appointing her to be the bureau’s first director.
Why?
Because he’s worried the Senate might not confirm the 61-year-old Harvard law professor who has been a smart and relentless critic [...]

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is the latest economist to warn the Federal Reserve that continuing to drive interest rates down, down, down won’t boost the economy or create more jobs.
That’s a little surprising coming from Reich, who is certainly not a conservative devotee of free-market economics.
Reich, who now teaches at the University of [...]

After taking a couple of weeks off federal regulators went back to work yesterday, closing one failed Florida bank.
Horizon Bank in Brandenton was seized and all deposit accounts, excluding brokered accounts, were sold to Bank of the Ozarks, which is based in Little Rock, Ark.
Horizon Bank’s four branches will reopen Monday as Bank of the [...]

Pawn shops. Payday loan stores. Check cashing services. Tax preparers hawking refund anticipation loans.
In Broke, USA, author Gary Rivlin gets cozy with giants of what he calls Poverty, Inc. — the multi-billion dollar industry of making money off the poor.
It’s shocking how open these guys are in discussing their work him.
He must have been [...]

For the second week in a row, regulators seized only a single bank at the close of business on Friday.
And once again the lone bank taken down was in the Chicago area.
This time the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Illiniois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation closed Palos Bank and Trust Co. in Palos Heights, [...]

Lance Dickie, an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, has an idea for how “Congress and the Obama administration can help rebuild household solvency by rewarding savers.
“Adjust IRS rules so the first $1,000 of interest income is not subject to taxes. Allow tax filers to deduct a grand from their tally of interest earned.
“Quit penalizing [...]

Hooray for federal Judge William Alsup of California.
At the end of a two-week trial he’s ruled that Wells Fargo secretly and deliberately manipulated the way it processed checking account transactions in order to ding its customers for more overdraft fees.
Alsup ordered the bank to pay customers $230 million in restitution – but don’t sit by [...]

Only one bank was seized by regulators on Friday, pushing the total number of failed banks to 109 for the year.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Illiniois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation closed Ravenswood Bank in Chicago.
Its deposits were transferred to Northbrook Bank and Trust Co., based in Northbrook, Ill., and all Ravenswood branches [...]

The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

We were breaking furniture around Bankaholic World Headquarters yesterday afternoon after Randolph Bank limited its high-yield checking account to North Carolina residents.
In this lousy market, the Extra-Mile Choice account was a real deal.
We first wrote about it less than two weeks ago, and the bank had just gotten its online application working the day before [...]

As you may recall, we thought that making the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection a part of the decidedly consumer-unfriendly Federal Reserve was a terrible idea.
But President Obama has a chance to make at least some amends by appointing Elizabeth Warren as the bureau’s first director.
As we’ve said before, Warren has been one the [...]

Another five banks were seized by regulators yesterday, pushing the total number of failed banks to 108 for the year.
The failed banks were in four states – Florida, Georgia, Washington and Oregon – and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. immediately sold their deposits and branches to other banks.
Those branches reopened this morning under the [...]

A new study quantifies what most of us already know: More Americans are in financial trouble now, than in a very long time.
At least 25 years according to Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker, who lead the research team whose work was paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The study concluded that families became financially insecure [...]

Seven more banks were seized by regulators last week, pushing the total number of failed banks to 103 for the year.
At this rate, it appears more FDIC-insured banks will be shuttered this year than in the three previous years combined (130 in 2009, 25 in 2008 and three in 2007).
The banks closed on July [...]