Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Started reading Fark again and tripped across some business stories from the main stream media that made my stomach turn (haven’t had a good rant lately). Why isn’t the entire financial world imploding into a black hole is my only question?

British Import I Hope Not to See

So there is a “Money Card” that is branded as a Visa card in the U.K. that ends up charging up to 365% interest on balances. Doorstep lending, gives you this card with a positive balance of 300 pounds sterling, which you then can use to purchase things, however, the balance is actually a loan, and you must pay it off before you can use the card after you have used up it’s balance. If you pay back sooner, you pay more in interest, which is astounding to me.

Naturally this isn’t a card a person with a good credit rating could use, instead, this is marketed and aimed at those who cannot get a credit card, and thus are less likely to complain about this new usury rates (also less likely to pay it back would be my guess as well).

If this kind of stuff is going on in Canada, I really hope the government steps in to stop it. Loan Sharking used to be a crime, guess now it is just “Good Business Practice”?

Less Foreclosures in the U.S. ?

Well not really, what is actually happening is that the banks are so overwhelmed with folks not paying their mortgages on time, that they have started to look the other way. Evidently folks are simply staying in their house and seeing if anyone is going to kick them out, which evidently isn’t happening as fast as you would think?

I get the feeling this whole “low interest scam” thing is just not going to go away, and may be a much deeper pit than I thought it was.

When In Doubt Change the Rules

One of my favorite lines from a movie was, “Just when you thought you understood the game, we CHANGED THE RULES!!!“, and that statement seems to be true in the world of Financial Institutions as well. This article from the Seattle Times, implies that the Washington Mutual bonus system which previously relied on things like profitability and such, are now being re-vectored, due to the company’s problems in the area of foreclosusures and such.

Let me quote directly:

However, its 2008 bonus plan for about 3,000 top employees specifically excludes the effects of bad-loan set-asides, foreclosures and restructuring costs from the financial criteria used to judge the executives.

Instead, in addition to measures such as operating income, bank fees and “customer loyalty,” the compensation committee will subjectively evaluate “how well our executive management team addressed the challenges in the housing, mortgage and credit markets and the impact of those challenges on our financial results.”

That seems fair, if this information is factual.