Word: card
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...ready for the Toxic Asset Loan Factory. TALF, the U.S. government's effort to boost consumer lending, finally launches next week. The program - officially the Term Asset-Backed-Securities Loan Facility - is targeted at restarting the market banks use to fund credit-card, auto and other consumer loans. But some worry TALF could create even more risky bonds that our nation's wobbly financial firms don't want and can't sell - a perverse unintended consequence of a well-intended program...
...heart of the program - and the biggest cause of complaints - is an effort to reignite the process by which most banks get the money they use to make consumer loans. To fund credit-card, auto and education lending, banks typically gather up loans they already have made and pass them off to an investment bank. Wall Street firms then package these into bonds that pay interest based on borrowers' loan payments. Completing the money-recycling loop, investors buy the bonds, and investment banks pass most of that money, minus a fee, back to the lenders. The lenders can then...
...that's what causes the problem. Every securitization deal creates some AAA-rated bonds and some lower-quality debts. In a typical credit-card securitization, as much as 15% of the bonds created will have ratings lower than AAA. And the government plan does nothing to help banks get those riskier bonds off their books. Worse, TALF might actually discourage investors who would normally be interested in these higher-yielding bonds from buying them...
...poke any eye to start one. In 1965 I wrote a story for New York having some sport with William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker. The moment our issue came off the press, Bellows sent a copy to Shawn. The detonator was a little inscription on the calling card that accompanied it: "With my compliments, James G. Bellows...
...work reimburses me, but even if [fares] don’t impact me directly, it really stinks that it might go up and up and up,” said Dallas R. Menard, who was adding money to his Charlie Card at the Harvard Square T station yesterday...