In February and March 2012, Demos surveyed a nationally representative sample of 997 low- and middle-income American households who carried credit card debt for three months or more.
In the latest unfortunate news at the intersection of motherhood and politics, stay-at-home moms are doing worse emotionally than their working counterparts.
Oil companies are doubling down on fighting a transparency provision in Dodd-Frank that would require the disclosure of payments made to foreign governments in connection with energy projects in their country. The provision requires information on payments for production licenses, taxes, royalties and other aspects of energy and mineral projects to be disclosed by oil and mineral companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The revelation that Apple chief Tim Cook pulled in $378 million in compensation in 2011, more than any other CEO, has sparked the usual debate about how much CEOs are worth. Cook made $300 million more than the next highest paid exec in America, Oracle's Larry Ellison, leading some to wonder whether he's really that much better than his peers (especially since the late Steve Jobs is widely seen as the genius behind Apple's current success.)
The Credit CARD Act is helping households pay down balances faster, with a third of low- and middle-income households that carry credit card debt reporting that new disclosures have caused them to pay down their balances faster.
David Brooks offers up a spirited defense of private equity today in the Times, and many of his points make perfect sense: In fact, many private equity firms don't set out to laden the firms they buy with debt and cash out before the company goes bankrupt.
In the latest unfortunate news at the intersection of motherhood and politics, stay-at-home moms are doing worse emotionally than their working counterparts.
With anti-regulatory fervor gripping Washington, it’s difficult to imagine both parties working together to enact successful public safeguards that protect Americans. But it wasn’t that long ago that strong, bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate took action to defend consumers against predatory practices in the credit card industry. Three years ago today, President Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (Credit CARD Act) into law.
The economy may be growing again, but many Americans are still in a cash crunch.
In the past year, 40% of low- and middle-income households used credit cards to pay for basic living expenses, such as rent or mortgage bills, groceries, utilities, or insurance, according to survey released Tuesday by think tank Demos.
Staring back at me from the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a headline that promised an answer to a puzzle that had endured for more than a month, and which I have explored here and here. The blame for the multi-billion dollar JP Morgan credit default swap fiasco had been discovered.
Cory Booker didn't distinguish himself as a particularly adept politician when, yesterday on Meet the Press, he undercut the Obama campaign's message by criticizing its attacks on Bain Capital. Booker is a surrogate for the campaign after all, and if there's one thing that's expected of surrogates it's that they stay on message.
It's no secret that Facebook's IPO will feed one of the most troubling trends in America today: the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite.
Leaders in the House of Representatives introduced The Voter Empowerment Act of 2012 to protect and promote our freedom to vote. This bill seeks to provide more access to the ballot, more efficiency in our election systems, and more accountability in our elections.
Okay, so the headline overstates things: The problem is not that the booming tech sector fails to produce any jobs; the problem is that one of the most robust parts of our economy isn't producing enough jobs to make a dint in this nation's unemployment crisis.
Data released last month by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center shows that the 12-month period between May 2011- April 2012 was the warmest year to date since recordkeeping began in 1895. The first quarter of 2012 alone saw temperatures that were more than 5 degrees F above average. In addition to temperatures, precipitation patterns are also abnormal.
The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin (above, Credit/David A.Grogan) and Jim LaCampJP Morgan Chase’s “terrible, egregious mistake” has touched off a firestorm of utter nonsense, ignited by the Jamie Dimon’s subtle spinning and fanned by the misinformation parroted by the media.
The JP Morgan Chase fiasco in which it lost $2 billion (so far) on a “hedge” of the bank’s global exposures to corporate risks bristles with implications for the push to implement the reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act -- and the effort to strangle reform in its crib.