Virginia will pay for an invisible company to create jobs

It really sounds shocking when you strip away the bullshit: Spotsylvania County and the state of Virginia have committed to giving $500,000 of taxpayer money to ....drums please...they don't know. They just know it's a big healthcare company that promises to create a lot of jobs.
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/112009/11232009/508425
One issue I always harped on - and actually got the state law changed on after writing an investigative series - is the utter frustration of watching the economic development wars play out. That endless shakedown game where a company tells multiple states and local governments that it has lots of options for its new plant, HQ, etc. Said company always knows which location makes sense in terms of operating costs, taxes logistics, customer and supplier proximity, transportation - you know, the really big important costs and benefits that matter over the long term.
But the company makes them all think they are really in the running, and keeps them bidding against each other with the insane belief that the amount of money they put up will actually influence the decision.
The incentive money is just peanuts in the big picture for the company. For a locality though, it could be money that was going to go to taking care of the homeless or to the city museum. And it's public money that isn't available to other existing employers who have faithfully provided jobs in their community without a government handout.
It's most galling to me when the consultants these companies pay have the sheer arrogance to tell the localities that they can't even know who it is they are paying to bring into their community. Usually the fight is public officials trying to shield the deal from the public so it doesn't blow the deal because the companies swear them to secrecy. (This incidentally plays into the hands of the consultants because the localities are kept in the dark and don't know what the other players are doing. Only the consultant has complete information. Economic development people have so much fear of these guys pulling deals they faithfully abide by these unwritten rules. Ironically, the officials could easily change the game and collude to set their own terms together.)
The sad reality is that this company wil get its half a mil, cut a ribbon with a whole raft of smiling public officials, hire a bunch of people and then when the first downturn hits, lay off as many as necessary or close the plant. I don't blame them.
But why do they have to shake down the public to open in the first place?
Over time, I've felt more sympathy for the public officials who have to play this game. They feel trapped. It won't end until Congress just bans it nationwide - an incentives arms race detente. But I still see some of this shit and it just makes me shake my head.
The one thing I hammered on in my series were the lack of enforcement provisions once companies do the inevitable in the face of the next downturn. It means you have to have a rock solid contract that spells out in detail how many jobs, how much investment, timelines and penalties.
Listen to what the geniuses in Spotsy are doing for enforcement. They get their money back "if the actual investment figures by the company differ significantly from what has been proposed." I've seen the haggling that goes on over really specific contract language in these agreements. You want to guess how big of a dump truck a corporate lawyer can drive through "differ significantly"?
I remember how Virginia politicians postured and complained years back when Virginia lost a huge Dell plant that was lured to North Carolina with obscene sums of money. Guess what happened this year as the recession pounded Dell? Surprise. They closed. I'm sure the politicans are going to line up and scream that this means we should be more precautious with how we give away public money to big companies. Or maybe instead we'll just throw it at the ghost in the corner with its hand out.

McDonnell: I Pledge to be a Car Title Lender Jobs Governor

As Virginia Republican Governor candidate Bob McDonnell was campaigning on October 19th, the day before the final debate, he had a good friend provide him with $4,800 worth of air and ground travel. Who was this kind patron? LoanMax, the car title lender that devastates the lives of countless Virginians every year and repossesses their cars. McDonnell knows them well.
Presumably, the generous gift means LoanMax isn’t holding any grudges over the fine he gave them as attorney general when he forced them to follow laws that were long on the books that they had always ignored.
Their lack of a grudge for their supposed tormentor would be because as I have said before, he is wrapped tight with them and LoanMax was actually happen about what McDonnell did. He legitimized them and their industry, didn’t push for any real regulation and went after all their smaller competitors for doing the same thing.
And these fine lenders also just so happen to employ lobbyists who both help run McDonnell’s campaign and funnel money from a federal Republican State Leadership Committee into campaigns so the donors can not be traced directly to their chosen candidate. That same committee just so happened to be the one that pumped millions into his campaign at the last second that enabled him to buy a ton of ads and win the attorney general race in the closest statewide race in history. And oh, LoanMax pumped $50,000 into that committee back then right before McDonnell got it. But that was probably just a coincidence, right?
Right now the predatory lenders are playing a very smart hand in the Virginia Governor’s race. McDonnell’s their guy, but they know their contributions to the candidates have made it so hard for those fine citizens to then advocate for the industry. So they’ve been sending some of their money instead to the federal PAC, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which directs it to Virginia candidates. As it turns out, the RSLC money is directed to Virginia candidates by Chris Jankowski, who runs a Richmond lobby shop called Rhumb Line. His partner Carrie Cantrell was a flack for George Allen and Jerry Kilgore, whom let the predatory lending industry grow up and mature without interference when he was attorney general. Among the Rhumb Line clents is the great LoanMax. Carrie Cantrell has been the spokeswoman for both LoanMax and the RSLC. Oh, and Jerry Kilgore’s twin carried the first bill that would have legitimized the title lenders by “regulating” them and allowing them to charge unlimited interest rates.
And now, as Jeff Schapiro wrote in a recent Richmond-Times column http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/columnists_news/article/JEFF25_20091024-221406/301492/ in addition to controlling how Republican money is divvied out to Richmond Republican leaders, Jankowski and his guys are substantially helping McDonnell run his campaign. Not much of a surprise Loan Max is shuffling him around then I guess.
And even Bill Howell, the Republican House leader also must answer to the RSLC and Jankowski and his car title buddies because the RSLC funnels him a nice chunk of change. I’ve heard that Howell’s faith makes him leery of predatory lending, but I’m just not buying it. Jankowski owns him too.
Over the years, it’s become increasingly toxic for politicians to have fistfuls of money from the predators that everyone can see easily at the Virginia Public Access Project, www.vpap.org . So what they do now as much as possible is funnel it through these committees.
Look at LoanMax. They have pumped $113,000 into races in 2009 alone. Almost $60,000 of that went to committees and then off to wherever those groups funneled the money. LoanMax only openly supported one statewide candidate, the Republican Lieutenant Governor candidate Bill Bolling. Then they make all these smaller donations in these individual races. But we’re expected to believe they just don’t care about the attorney general and governor races – the chief enforcer of state laws against lenders and the guy with the bully pulpit and veto pen? Yeah, I’m sure the big donations given to those committees didn’t find their way to their chosen candidates. But if you know LoanMax also gives as Select Management Resources, you see they have also directly given $9,800 to McDonnell and $4,150 to Cuccinelli.
There is absolutely no way to know where these donors to these committees are asking their money to be sent because it doesn’t have to be disclosed. It’s supposedly just given with no earmarked intent. But the way it really works is there’s a wink and nod, it’s understood who money is being raised for, you just don’t say it. (Former North Carolina Democratic Gov. Mike Easley is in trouble right now over this funneling from committees right to him.) So there’s no way to prove the payday and car title guys are hiding donations they are giving McDonnell and Cucinnelli.

So who’s been feeding the RSLC for “Virginia candidates” this year?
$50,000 Ace Cash Express
$45,000 CFSA (payday trade group)
$40,000 Select Management Resources
$5,000 Select Management Resources
$2,500 Check into Cash

Most of that money went 5 places: Republican Party of Virginia, Dominion Leadership Trust, Chris Stolle (who will unseat Democrat Del. Joe Bouchard, who has run an idiotic campaign) and Ken Cucinnelli and the Virginia Senate Republican Leadership Trust. You think any of that cash might have gone to the soon-to-be Republican governor and attorney general?
Let’s wrap this back around. The biggest car title lender helped McDonnell become attorney general, is backing him for governor, drives and flies him to campaign events, their lobbyists supply him with staffing for his campaign and controls his party’s federal PAC money coming in. You still think the settlement with LoanMax was McDonnell striking a blow against predatory lending? It’s a game. I explained the details of how in a previous post and won’t again. But you can already tell what will happen after McDonnell and Cuccinelli are elected. Car title lending legislation will be passed to “regulate” them. It will be done with the help of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, who is also in the predatory lenders’ pockets and has always protected them. The payday lenders have started over as car title lenders after some minimal regulations were passed on them because title lenders have no regulation whatsoever. The new laws will do nothing to stop the abuses of the poor. Jankowski’s “business model” proves successful, just like the happy days of KStreet, Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff. And it’s all perfectly legal! Happy election day Virginia!

Virginia’s Financial Predators, Conservative Christians and the KKK, Part 1

So it didn’t really surprise me when I saw the other week that the spokesman for one of the fine predatory car title lenders in our state who wrote a letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch is a sociopathic right-wing wackjob.
One thing I’ve seen persistently from payday and car title lending people is that they are almost entirely allied with the craziest elements of the right-wing – and particularly with Christian conservatives. It’s a fine alliance.
This guy’s name is Phil Kent, a Georgia “author, political commentator and consultant.” He is worried about the destruction of our country’s Judeo-Christian values, works for Fast Auto Loans and has worked for years for financial predators. He’s written such brilliant tomes as “Foundations of Betrayal: How the Liberal Super-Rich Undermine America” and “The Dark Side of Liberalism,” and is enthusiastically plugging “My Friend Newt Gingrich’s Rediscovering God in America” at the center of his home page. In case you weren’t aware, God is completely in love with predatory lenders. And if you look through some of Kent’s other writings, you also realize that God Hates Illegals and is fearful the white man will soon be in the minority.
This guy always looks like he’s advocating for some industry “independently” that later he just might be working for. He wrote a long column defending payday loans in 2004 in the Atlanta Journal defending the payday industry in that state. He didn’t say he was getting paid for them at the time – or the newspaper would have disclosed it – just plugging his book. But later it turns out he’s working for that industry. And it’s funny how often you see these guys who are fiercely championing these causes in the name of conservatism and free markets and later are openly being paid to do so.
This guy’s passion project is going after illegal immigrants. He wrote a book called “What’s Yours Is Mine,” which is about the “impact and consequences of the Third World illegal immigration invasion.” He’s also the spokesman for anti-illegal immigrant group Americans for Immigration Control.
He’s also one of the main writers for this wacko Middle American News Web site, which is full of some of the most racist shit I’ve ever seen without openly saying Yes, We are The KKK. A News Brief headlined “Detroit’s Nightmare Continues” starts “Detroit’s multicultural public school system is on the brink of bankruptcy.” So it’s not all the automakers going bankrupt? It’s that the schools are “multicultural”? What the fuck?! Don’t worry. His readers are good translators. They know multicultural means black. The schools are failing because they are full of poor black people. (The kind who make nice payday loan customers.) Another authorless article entitled “White America Ends in 2042” starts thusly: “The efforts by America’s ruling commercial and political elites to use mass immigration to turn the United States into a non-white, multi-racial society are succeeding.” Wow. One of Phil’s own nutty columns calls Obama a “dangerous, anti-white multiculturalist.”
In his letter defending car title lending against the evil rich, powerful folks at the Virginia Poverty Law Center, he jokes that the VPLC’s letter against the industry “frets about vehicle repossessions.” As if it’s some wacko liberal idea to be concerned that thousands of Virginians are losing their cars to car title lenders and watching their lives devolve into the depths of misery. He even screws over Fast Auto Loans, who he works for, by going off the script they pay him for to rant that the VPLC has championed the cause of illegal immigrants and gotten them support services. And then the kicker from this mental midget: he asks why VPLC can’t have compassion for cash-strapped consumers who can’t obtain credit – including illegals – when title loans offer them a “hassle-free lifeline.” So this guy hates illegals and deplores VPLC for advocating for them to get “services,” then says title loans are a great product that benefit them! Hilarious. If it wasn’t so sad.
You want to see what that lifeline looks like in practice? A woman who took out a loan from Fast Auto went to VPLC to show them her documents. She took out a $1250 loan in September 2008, paid $3600 over the next year and had only knocked $18 off her principal. To anyone with even a bit of a conscious, reading that makes them sick. But not these people, the politicians who they’ve bought or their flacks.
This guy is a major car title lender’s spokesperson. They just went straight for the nutjob. The largest car title lender is much smarter – they went for power and found a nice way to tuck the Republican gubernatorial candidate and House Speaker firmly in their back pocket without anyone knowing. More on that next post.
It makes sense that all these people consider it OK to call themselves Christian while running an industry that does nothing but impose misery on the poorest and most desperate of our society. A brilliant recent book called The Family outlined the creepy theology of these people. They believe that God is actively rewarding his anointed, and works through the powerful. This theology also reinforces to the poor that God has chosen these travails for them, and that it’s their lot in life they should accept. It makes total sense that this delusional theology would be prevalent with predatory lenders, and they’d be tight with politicians who also share this twisted view of Christian theology. They tell themselves they are trying to help these borrowers because the loans do aid a small minority of borrowers who can pay back their loans immediately. But most can’t. And as those people descend into a bottomless spiral of debt and misery with payday loans and car title loans, the lenders tell themselves they are not to blame. God has anointed them, and God’s favored version of capitalism is one with the least amount of regulation. The borrowers must suffer because they are irresponsible, which is part of the reason they’re poor, and God is giving them what they deserve.
Rest assured, my wacko payday friends and your political allies. The great prophet of peace and charity Jesus Christ is squarely in your corner.

Part II: It’s not just the wackjob wing of the right that works for the predatory lenders. They reach deep into the heart of power with their “spokespeople” in Virginia.

Newspaper Political Endorsements Should End, and Kill the Editorials While You're At It

This past week my former newspaper, The Daily Press, endorsed Bob McDonnell for Governor.
And I doubt anyone will ever know exactly how or why that choice was made. I don't mean the reasoning they printed about why he would make a better governor, but who exactly it was at the newspaper that was endorsing him.
The process of the newspaper political endorsement is ridiculous, largely because there is no transparency whatsoever in the process for the public.
It's not just the public kept in the dark.
When I worked in newspapers, it was never clear how exactly the "newspaper" was choosing a candidate to endorse or who was doing it. Many newspapers just did away with them for that very reason. There are editorial boards, but they have gotten smaller as newspapers have suffered and shrunk in recent years. That makes people who still reside in them more powerful. I can't tell you this for sure or in any quantitative way, but I think it makes publishers more powerful too.
Publishers are the top executive at each newspaper, and they ususally come from the advertising side. And when they want to lean on the editorial side, some have quite a bit of strength. Others just participate by giving their opinions in a roomful of opinions - particularly in the more classic design of an editorial board when newspapers were flush.
What bothers me is that endorsements do not explicitly say who was involved in the decision and how it was made - meaning group concensus, vote, etc. That means there is no accountability. I was at the Daily Press when we endorsed John McCain, and none of us in the newsroom could get an answer as to how the decision was made that we as a newspaper made this decision. It clearly had nothing to do with the newsroom because nobody asked us anything. And honestly, it was never clear who all was included in the editorial board. The print paper (there's nothing on the Daily press Web site that I can find right now) said who was on the "board." But other people would go to meetings with the board, including reporters, with certain newsmakers coming in to meet and inform. Sometimes reporters were asked about specific facts and maybe a little opinion by people who were writing editorials but we never actually wrote anything or were formally polled.
It was often just one person writing the editorial itself, and it was never clear how many people's opinions were actually informing how the editorial was written. And how does the editorial writer handle it when their individual opinion differs with the other members of the "board"?
I don't usually care that much. I have always ignored newspaper editorials because they clearly aren't news I can filter however I want. They are opinion, but I have no clue whose opinion! I think that's why blogs and columnists are better. You at least know whose opinion you are hearing. It's not the opinion part I mind, it's the anonymity of the writer and process transparency issue. Ironically, many supporters of the editorial process are people who decry the comments sections at the end of stories where the world's most idiotic and racist losers gather.
The other huge problem for the generic "editorial" is that a lot of news readers and sources think that it represents the opinions of the reporter who covers whatever the subject of the editorial is. So if, for example, the subject is the city of Hampton, some people think the Hampton reporter wrote it or directed it. A lot of times as a reporter you didn't even know there was an editorial that was going to completely piss off your sources you dealt with all the time until they were calling you when you came to work bitching about the editorial you didn't even know was in the paper that day!
Coming back to the Daily Press endorsements for president and governor, I didn't know then and don't know now how they occurred. But I do know who at least are the people who I think were making the decision. And based on the opinion and internal power dynamics, I would guess that endorsement fully reflected the opinion of one person at the entire newspaper - the publisher.
And if that's the case, you have to wonder if the modern newspaper corporation has really thought through the implications of giving a lot of power to the publishers at their newspapers. If that person is using their time and power to project their opinion through editorial content rather than purely tending to the operations and bottom line of the enterprise, are they fulfilling their fiduciary duty to the corporation? Does the company even want them to hold and wield that power at all, or does it want a roomful of people with different opinions debating an endorsement? Should they consider how the opinion running in that editorial will affect the bottom line of the paper based on who reads it? From a purely financial standpoint, absolutely they should. But that wouldn't be a very intellectually honest approach, would it? Plenty of liberal publishers have also wielded control over their newspapers' editorial pages as well. Ironically, conservative paranoids are right that there are more liberals than conservatives in the news business. But many of the people in positions of power and ultimate authority on the really big stuff are conservative.
Bottom line: the whole idea of the editorial should be killed. And don't think it doesn't ever matter. Creigh Deeds won his primary in large part because the Washington Post endorsement of him over his 2 Northern Virginia rivals gave him the numbers he needed to beat them up there. The WaPo endorsed him over McDonnell too, but it won't matter this time. He has run a disastrous campaign and the electorate has made up their mind. And McDonnell has already picked up some other Virginia newspaper endorsements that will surely baffle their local conspiratorial right wing nutjobs who are convinced ACORN is running their local paper.
The only conspiracy is that none of us have any freakin' clue how these endorsements are decided, what they really mean or why we have any need for them as a society.

Why I'm Boycotting the Virginia Governor's Race

So I’ve decided I’m done: I’m boycotting the Governor’s race in Virginia.
I can not stand Bob McDonnell. I have no doubt at all that once he doesn’t have to play the game and run for office anymore that Taliban Bob will be out for all to see. And I don’t really want to be governed by the Taliban even if it’s a Christian Taliban. And you better believe ole’ Bob will be “business friendly” – which means no consumer protection even from full-on scams, no limits on predatory lenders, no environmental protection and plenty of Christian social engineering (I mean family promotion through friendly government direction on personal decisions).
But Hell if Creigh Deeds and his buffoon advisors have not done anything they could think of to turn off every voter in sight who doesn’t close their eyes and vote for the Democrat. First he ran an incredibly deceptive ad about McDonnell supporting a rate increase for AEP customers in Virginia. As far as consumer protection goes McDonnell was a joke of an attorney general. But this is one thing you can’t hit him on because he had nothing to do with it. And it’s not true.
The AG office is supposed to represent Virginia consumers on electric rate cases. For the most part they do a decent job and are insulated from any politics of the AG-of-the-moment. Truth be told, I don’t think most AGs really even understand what these folks do or get involved at all. Electric rates are largely dictated by state laws set by legislators like Deeds who have in recent years given the incumbent utilities anything they wanted. All the AG office can do is hire outside experts who can spell out how much the utilities are spinning data and facts to justify the highest rates possible. The problem in Virginia is the people who do this for Virginians do it behind the scenes and don’t get loud and public when the utilties are trying to pull a fast one – which they often are. This is part of the dark side of Virginia’s business-friendly environment. In many other states there is an independent consumer office that will raise flags publicly when the utility is pulling a fast one. But the utility people in the AG office under McDonnell did the same job they always do. And when AEP was entitled to an increase under state law, the AG office said they were entitled to a much smaller increase than they wanted. Deeds’ idiot advisors tried to spin that into McDonnell advocating for a price increase for every Virginian. Which is just a complete lie.
And then there is the even bigger issue that makes my blood boil. The single biggest issue in this state is transportation - hands down. McDonnell has proposed a plan that is nothing but a gimmick that seeks to shift money from public safety and education – which the legislature refuses to do regardless of what party is in power. He also proposed privatizing the state ABC stores, an idea that’s long overdue and won’t raise a ton of money for transportation, but at least it’s right. I think it might be the only decent thing I’ve heard out of McDonnell.
The sad reality is that the only way to fix out transportation problems is to raise taxes. Specifically to raise the gas tax that is dedicated to roads. And Deeds is willing to do this but he doesn’t have the balls to say it. He dances around it. But it’s crystal clear that his moron advisers have told him not to utter the words so McDonnell can’t run an ad with Deeds saying he’ll raise taxes.
And so what we get instead is Deeds trying to wink at everyone that he’s willing to raise taxes for roads but won’t say it. He talks about finding new revenue sources outside of the general fund, which means raising the gas tax. And when reporters ask him directly how he will raise money for roads as he’s pledged, he snaps at them. Last week when my friend Chelyen Davis at the Fredericksburg paper asked him a question trying to nail down precisely his position, he snapped at her and called her young lady while not answering the question. He was trying to be patronizing, and it completely backfired on him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH5VK4e_9SQ
Now Chel has been covering the General Assembly for a long time, is tough as nails and does not take any shit from a good ole’ boy. She’s from rural West Virginia, knows the entire legislature and is damn smart. Good ole boys do not intimidate her. She laughed at him and said she wasn’t trying to be mean to him. He was trying to cow her and she made him look like a completely weak little crybaby without even trying to. She was just trying to get a comprehensible answer to a straightforward question. And now the McDonnell campaign is using the exchange in an ad. And while McDonnell believes God has ordained it OK for Christian chauvinism, Deeds reveals that he believes in simple good ole boy chauvinism. I’ve seen plenty of men in Virginia try to pull that on experienced female reporters and get killed by it in the end.
You think a guy who won’t be honest about what needs to be done to fix our roads during a campaign is going to then convince the legislature to do so? Me either. So even though he’s ostensibly on the right side of the one issue that really matters to me, I’m disgusted with Deeds at this point. I can’t vote for him. I’m sick of always voting against someone and this time I’ve reached my breaking point and I’m not doing it.
And on a side note – Virginia Democrats should take note of these idiots running the Deeds campaign. They won the primary through a series of fortunate circumstances in my opinion. Their heads got huge as their “brilliant” campaign tactics were talked up, and ever since have done nothing but make one stupid decision after another.
And now they’re going to lose.

Debit card ripoffs and financial reform

So when you were younger or going through a tough financial time and living paycheck to paycheck, did you ever screw up and use your debit card thinking you have enough cash to cover a purchase but you didn’t?
I did, and the thing that really surprised me wasn’t that I screwed up somehow but that the transaction was still allowed to occur. How could I buy something with money I don’t have? After all, this isn’t a credit card. And then the fun part comes – seeing the bank overdraft fee that is larger than the actual purchase you made. (Then the cussing.)
The New York Times had a story on this overdraft game on Tuesday that was yet another reminder why a new consumer financial protection agency is desperately needed.
If you’re not just a straight-up deadbeat – which most people are not – you probably overdrew your account by accident. You had a miscalculation on when you were getting paid or did the math wrong on your balance. You forgot a purchase you made. A check took longer to clear than you knew – something that happened to me and infuriated me because I had just figured that when you make a deposit, the money is then yours and you can spend it immediately. Wrong. And since you probably did it by accident, you probably did not know and made multiple draws on your account before you knew you had overdrawn it. The $30-plus overdraft fees often turn out to essentially be a loan to you to allow you to make a purchase you didn’t have money for at an interest rate of over 1,000%. That’s worse than the payday lenders, a point they love to belabor to convince everyone they really aren’t so bad. So this guy in the story made 7 small purchases all under $12 each not realizing a previous deposit he made (read- he had good reason to believe he had enough money to cover his purchases) had not cleared yet. For not knowing the bank took multiple days to clear a deposit, it cost him $238! Unconscionable.
But it gets worse. The other thing they do – and this too happened to me when I was young and poor – is purposely order your purchases on a day by the largest first, regardless of the order in which they were made. So this optimizes the number of bounces they can get out of you. Their excuse is that consumers want to make sure they can make the big more important purchases first like utility bills. Bullshit. They know that doing it this way optimizes their fees. How much? This economist said eliminating these fees would cause 1,000 banks and 2,000 credit unions to fold. And 45% of these institutions collect more on these fees than they even make in profits total!
I remember when these things happened to me thinking literally one thing: how can this be legal? I wasn’t trying to spend money I didn’t have and didn’t want to. Why should they let the transaction go through and then take more money from me? And why should they be allowed to take days to process a deposit and to put bigger transactions first to hit me with more fees? How is all of this legal?!
Because there is no regulation. The Federal Trade Commission, OCC – a worthless agency that actually competed with other bank regulators by promising to regulate less – and the Federal Reserve were in charge of ensuring banks treated consumers fairly. To say the Fed doesn’t give a shit about consumer protection would be a massive understatement. Go back and read what Greenspan thought consumer protection meant to the new wave markets Wall Street and the banks were creating for “consumer credit” – especially mortgages. The Fed cares about managing the money supply through the movement of interest rates. I can’t even believe they have the balls and are being given power to become some systemic regulator after what they missed.
Some of my friends are “market worshippers” who think the market is some self-correcting force of nature. There truly is some truth to that, but many industries can abuse consumers without consequence if there is no effective regulation. As a consumer, how do you punish bad actors if the bad actors’ competitors are all doing the same thing?! And why is it so hard for you to understand that many financial products are beyond the understanding of a lightly-educated middle class citizen who works hard, has good intentions to not live beyond their means but just flat-out doesn’t understand complicated financial products that someone is getting paid a fat commission to lie about?
At some point, it is institutionalized theft that somebody has to put some brakes on. What is so difficult about having basic terms everyone can understand and then diverging from those as points of difference used to compete? That’s what the template for the consumer agency envisions. Have a “vanilla” product for all financial products with common terms and then companies can clearly disclose how they diverge from those terms. And if the entire industry is doing something very clearly shady and manipulative like some of these debit practices, there is one agency that is only dedicated to making sure consumers understand what is going on and actually have a choice.

Business 101: Keep Your Cookies in Stock!

So I don't have a very strong sweet tooth and don't often keep a bunch of junk in stock in the kitchen. I don't really get a lot of sweets cravings, even though I'll always eat sweet stuff if it's put in front of me. But I do have a major weakness - cookies.

Which leads me to a very bizarre rant, but it needs to be said. Why does everyone who makes fresh cookies CONSTANTLY RUN OUT???!!! As a cookie junkie and someone interested in how businesses are run, it drives me absolutely beserk!

I really started getting bad with the cookies when I was taking my MBA classes at nights from 7-10. It was easy to get groggy, but getting to be the old man I am, I can't sleep if I drink caffeine too late. So I started always getting a cookie wherever I'd pick up a quick dinner on my way to class, and give myself a quick sugar burst around our 8:30 break.

So I had a group of different places I would stop to pick up dinner before class which changed with my job change, workout locations, cravings and routes to class. The only one that always had their cookies in stock was Panera, which has pretty kick-ass cookies. But every single one of the independent places I bought cookies from was out anywhere from 40-75% of the time!

OK, first, if you're running out of something a lot, that's because it's a popular item. It just might even be a draw that gets people to buy other stuff while they are at your establishment. It may even be considered a minimum requirement to pick up a full to-go meal at your establishment. Sounds like common sense, right? Apparently not. And you know the cookies have got to carry ridiculous margins, based on what is charged and what it costs to bake one large cookie. Are you really that worried about having "excess inventory" of cookies when they sell that well and carry such high margins?! Sorry. Sounds like a crazy rant. But it's one of those little basic things that just reminds you of why so many small businesses fail. And if you can't get that right, you know they are messing up all kinds of big things too.

This problem has literally been so consistent and persistent it's made me wonder if I should open some kind of cookies-only business, and keep all these mom and pops in stock too since apparently it's a difficult thing to do.