Can the U.S. economy possibly get any scarier or more complicated?
The short answer is yes, it can. The longer, more complicated answer is that the looming (potential) failures of Ford, GM, and Chrysler present long term sustainability problems for a middle class that is already clamoring for short term, emergency solutions.
Ford recently announced [...]

On October 7, American Express revealed that they will begin limiting their customers’ access to credit based on both where they shop and which bank holds their primary mortgage. While there is nothing in the law that prevents American Express (or any other credit card company) from doing this, the announcement is noteworthy coming [...]

The U.S. stock market has been nothing if not volatile this year, especially over the course of the past few weeks. As the current credit crisis tightened and the world watched in horror, what most people saw was the stock market spiking and plummeting, often on mere rumor and speculation, and sometimes on the [...]

On August 26, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation increased the number of banks it considers in danger of failure from 90 to 117 and responded indirectly to concerns about its ability to insure money on deposit at retail banking institutions. The FDIC is considering increasing the fee it charges retail banks to insure their deposits [...]

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s estimates, every year, nearly $50 billion is lost as a result of identity theft and credit card frauds. Last week, consumers in the United States were shocked to hear that a team of computer hackers had hacked into the networks of nine retailers and managed to get more than [...]

According to a New York Times business editorial published on August 5th, when the Federal Reserve recently asked for comments on its proposed rules on abusive credit card practices, it received over 56,000 responses. Most of the responses were from credit card customers who were enraged over practices such as arbitrary interest rate hikes based [...]