Free Republic

The Biden administration has announced that it will provide $39 billion in total student debt relief for 804,000 borrowers, its latest step since President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court. The Education Department said on Friday that the relief is being provided on income-driven repayment plans, in which the federal government cancels remaining balances for the borrower after they have made their payments for 20 or 25 years. The department said the “fixes” will more accurately count monthly payments that qualify under the plans, and it will notify borrowers who are eligible for the...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that President Joe Biden can not invoke the 14th Amendment to address the debt ceiling under the current circumstances. Anchor Chuck Todd said, “Does the 14th Amendment fall under the category of extraordinary measures?”

During an interview with NewsNation on Thursday, House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) noted that then-House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tied fiscal and spending talks to raising the debt limit in 2019 and refused to pass a clean debt ceiling increase, and that Pelosi, along with President Biden, have opposed past debt ceiling raises without fiscal changes and that Pelosi and Biden did so back when the national debt was lower than it is now.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) stated that President Joe Biden is acting like people are going to starve and be deprived if the federal government goes to the funding levels that existed four months ago when he complains that the cuts Republican debt ceiling bill will hurt people. McCarthy said, “Remember what they did with that omnibus at the end of the year last year, they jammed it through and they increased spending…what we simply do is we pull the dollar figure back to 2022, what we were spending just...

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told activists on Wednesday that President Biden and his senior advisers are warming up to the idea of forgiving student debt, insisting they are closer to pulling the trigger “than ever before.” Schumer, who has repeatedly called for canceling up to $50,000 in student debt per borrower, predicted that’s where the president and his administration will ultimately land.

Sen. Mitt Romney said Tuesday he planned to join the rest of his Republican colleagues in the Senate to filibuster a planned vote on raising the debt ceiling. “We’re not voting in any way to help raise the debt ceiling. As a group we are all together,” Romney told reporters.

In 2017, the US national debt surpassed $20 trillion for the first time. Former President Donald Trump added about $7.8 trillion to the debt with spending and tax cuts. The debt ceiling needs to be raised to cover past fiscal decisions. Not many people outside the Beltway truly understand what the US's debt ceiling is or how and when it needs to be raised. And Senate Republicans are banking on that..... But the debt is also a product of Republicans' 2017 tax cut, which reduced federal revenues - corporate tax rates dropped from 35% to 21% - without a commensurate...

The White House on Friday issued a memo to state and local governments warning of potential consequences should Congress fail to raise the nation's debt ceiling in the coming days. Biden administration officials warned billions of dollars in state aid and federal funding for state-run programs could be stopped if a deal isn't reached, including disaster relief money, Medicaid programs and child nutrition benefits. "The U.S. economy has just begun to recover from the pandemic and a manufactured debt ceiling crisis would threaten the gains we’ve made and the future recovery. If the U.S. defaults on its obligations, the ripple...

Faced with a deluge of fraudulent unemployment claims, California officials said Thursday that 350,000 of the debit cards they issued containing benefits have been frozen because of suspicious activity, including a high number of claims at a single address. The debit cards frozen by the state Employment Development Department and Bank of America could represent billions of dollars in benefits paid out since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March. “The Department’s top priority is to quickly verify the identity of any claimants in this group that may have been impacted by scammer attacks, while we work to shut down the...

My daughter had her bank account hacked to the tune of 2K. The bank is giving her a run around. What can we do??

A Florida man allegedly attempted to eat a stolen debit card when he was confronted by police officers after attempting to use the card to purchase goods at Walt Disney World. Orange County police deputies arrested Jose Herrera, 27, on Monday. He had been held by Disney security after being caught while buying gift cards and jewelry at Disney Springs, Walt Disney World's shopping center, with the stolen card, which is believed to have been taken from a deceased Ohio man. Herrera allegedly tried to eat the evidence of his crime, with officers witnessing him attempting to chomp down on...

Will FDIC Regulations Shut Down the Prepaid Card Industry? We have written about prepaid debit cards several times in recent months, but this week we saw the latest news that could throw a monkey wrench in the burgeoning prepaid card industry. As reported by PaymentsSource, Bancorp Inc., one of the biggest issuers of prepaid cards with $4.7 billion in assets, saw its shares drop 30 percent when the company agreed to curtail its prepaid card activity as part of a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). A 22-page consent order mandates that Bancorp institute a number of changes...

Some clients of Washington state's Obamacare exchange say they have been incorrectly charged for coverage already, and can't log into the website because it is down, KING 5 News in Seattle reports. The site allows people to pick their payment date, and Shannon and Josh Bruner told the station last week that they signed up to pay on Dec. 24. They say they were billed early, leaving their bank account $800 in the red. They were unable to get onto the site to fix the problem because it was down for the second week in a row. The incident raises...

For the second week in a row, the Washington Healthplanfinder website is down, and it's causing problems for people who are dealing with billing issues. Some of them say the website is mistakenly debiting their accounts. Shannon Bruner of Indianola logged on to her checking account Monday morning, and found she was almost 800 dollars in the negative. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I got screwed,’” she said.

In a comuniqué from the I.M.F. at the conclusion of it’s twenty-sixth meeting, the International Financial and Monetary Committee (IFMC) said that global growth is slowing and “substantial downside risks remain” while pleading with U.S. leadership to resolve it’s debt crisis sooner, rather than later.

An Aldi customer in Milwaukee who shot and wounded an armed robber is suing police for the return of his gun. Nazir Al-Mujaahid had a concealed weapons permit to carry the gun, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blog Proof & Hearsay. In February, prosecutors said Al-Mujaahid was within his legal rights when he shot the man who pointed a shotgun at a cashier and then at Al-Mujaahid, according to a prior Journal Sentinel story. But police are keeping Al-Mujaahid’s gun as evidence in the case against two men accused in the robbery. Wisconsin Carry Inc., a gun rights group,...

Link only - Credit Unions Cashing In On Banks Charging Debit Card Fees

Government imposes new price controls on an industry. Industry raises prices elsewhere to make up for the artificial cap on cost recovery. Government expresses shock, shock at the development. For those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, this seems like deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once said. For those either too young or too “dim,” as the Washington Examiner puts it, the surprise should be a learning experience, even for a “dim bulb” like Dick Durbin During the debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, when Democrats controlled Congress, Durbin insisted on including an amendment...

As I detailed here in February in "Dick Durbin Is Stealing Your Free Checking," thanks to price controls on debit card transactions from the Durbin Amendment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank "financial reform" law, free checking is going the way of the dodo bird. The Durbin price controls on interchange fees -- the so-called "swipe fees" that retailers pay to bank and credit unions that process debit card transactions, go into effect this Saturday, October 1, and are already showing more dire effects than originally predicted. Not only is free checking disappearing at a rapid pace -- a new Bankrate.com survey...

This Saturday, government price controls on debit card interchange fees (which card issuers charge to merchants) go into effect. The controls are the result of the Durbin amendment to last year's Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. They were enacted at the behest of big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Walgreen's, which stand to gain a multimillion-dollar windfall. But the controls are already transforming the retail banking landscape. The Durbin amendment tasked the Federal Reserve with establishing the allowable maximum interchange fees. It originally intended to slash them by 70%-80%. In response to a firestorm of criticism, the Fed cut the fees...