Credit reports weren’t designed to be job-screening tools. But about half of employers now use them when making hiring decisions, according to a 2012 study by the Society for Human Resource Management. The practice cuts across all sectors of the economy, from high-level management to office assistants, home health-care aides, and people who work the counter serving frozen yogurt.
For some job seekers, repeated rejection by potential employers may be traceable to an unlikely source: their credit report.
Regulators are cracking down on some of the methods companies are using to screen candidates (two major companies this week were accused of using background checks to discriminate against black applicants.) But employers’ use of credit checks during the hiring process is legal and fairly common.
Regulators in the United Kingdom are looking into allegations that traders from some of the world's largest banks have been manipulating benchmark foreign-exchange rates to make profits on the backs of clients.
Bloomberg News broke the story earlier this week, citing interviews with several anonymous traders who claim the practice has been occurring for at least 10 years. [...]
We have learned, painfully, of the damage derivatives can do to an economy in a financial crisis. But derivatives are hurting the economy even on its best days, according to a new study.
In the wake of the National Security Agency scandal, the mainstream media is obsessing over Edward Snowden’s security clearance. It is asking, along with Senators from the Intelligence Committee, why a systems administrator at Booz Allen Hamilton had access to troves of top-secret documents and whether or not the vetting process for the other 1.4 million people with top-secret clearances is rigorous enough. The fear, the mainstream seems to be pushing on Americans, is that other leaks are in store.
Last month Nevada joined a growing number of states and cities that are forbidding companies from using credit checks to make employment decisions. But the practice is still legal under federal law. [...]
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spent his career cultivating the image of a man who gets what he wants. In 2011, he rammed same-sex marriage legislation through the legislature, even with a Republican-controlled Senate. In 2012, when he wanted New York to be the first state to pass gun-control laws after the Newtown shooting, he was similarly productive. This year, Cuomo has said he wants to make state elections fairer, by lowering contribution limits and supplementing small donations with public dollars to give them more weight.
One by one, the House Financial Services Committee has rubber-stamped industry approved bills that would weaken elements of Dodd-Frank designed to hem in risky derivatives trading.
For lawmakers in Washington, the daily chase for money can begin with a breakfast fundraiser in the side room of a Washington restaurant.
At noon, there might be a $500-per-plate lunch with lobbyists in a Capitol Hill town house. The day might wrap up in an arena sky box in downtown Washington, watching a basketball game with donors.
Imagine that you're trying to make an extremely complicated decision. You want to understand the facts and do the right thing. At one ear, you have someone -- perhaps a former colleague -- who whispers you highly detailed advice six times a day, cajoling and pleading. At the other ear, is someone who whispers you advice only once or twice a week.
With a contracting retirement income system, rapidly rising health-care costs, and the prospect of long-term care expenses, one would have thought that people approaching retirement would be paying off their credit card debt and closing out their mortgages. But surveys suggest that people are entering retirement with more debt than ever before and relying on borrowing to cover expenses in retirement.
Housing prices are coming back and consumers—feeling flush now that their home equity is rebounding—are more confident than they've been in four years. The American middle class is finally getting back on its feet after a half decade of trauma, right?
Progressive organizations in New York City and Washington, D.C. rail a good amount against big banks. But not enough of those organizations have cut themselves off from those "too-big-to-fail" institutions to join, say, the Amalgamated Bank (AB), a bank which does not have a history of scandals and scams that banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase do.
It used to be that many Americans entered retirement having paid off their mortgages and most of their other debts. This should have been senior citizens' Golden Years.
Nowadays, more and more people over the age of 65 are struggling with mounting debt levels, fueled primarily by mortgages and credit cards. The average debt held by senior citizens has ballooned to $50,000 in 2010, up 83% since 2001, according to Federal Reserve data crunched by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. [...]
As the capital is engulfed in scandals, advocates of campaign finance reform are intensifying their pressure on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, urging him to persuade the Legislature to rewrite state elections law in the hope that change in New York could have an influence nationally.
The National Voter Registration Act set the first ever national standards for mail-in registration and increased the number of places people could register to vote, including motor vehicle and public assistance offices.
New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come.