Word: credit-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...
...Settlement is a renegotiation of debts that stops short of bankruptcy. Unsecured creditors such as credit-card issuers are willing to accept sharply reduced paybacks from especially troubled customers because they might not get a penny in bankruptcy court. The field has been replete with shady operators and high fees, but states are beginning to regulate it, and Croxson thinks it's headed for mainstream legitimacy (CareOne does not do debt settlement but sometimes steers clients in that direction). Big-time financial trouble is on its way to becoming a respectable middle-class phenomenon...
...thing Dodd has done of late is tack hard to populism. He has held hearings on credit-card abuses and introduced stringent legislation to prevent companies from luring consumers into dangerous amounts of debt. Last October, Senate majority leader Harry Reid took the unusual move of overriding a Democratic hold on a bill after Dodd tried to block an extension of President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping powers over concerns from the left about granting telecom giants retroactive immunity for working with the Administration. Most notably, Dodd, against the wishes of the White House, slipped into the stimulus bill...