Salon.com > Paul Kiel

Soldiers are casualties of corrupt creditors

Thu, 16 May 2013 21:20:00 +0000

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

Seven years after Congress banned payday-loan companies from charging exorbitant interest rates to service members, many of the nation's military bases are surrounded by storefront lenders who charge high annual percentage rates, sometimes exceeding 400 percent.

How installment lenders put borrowers in a world of hurt

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:58:00 +0000

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn't be. She'd been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn't there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn't get to work.

Understanding the bailout

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Quick, how many billions in the red are taxpayers on the bailout of GM? AIG? Fannie and Freddie? Is it true that the government has reaped a profit from bailing out the banks?

It should be easy to find answers to such questions. But while it's a snap to find rosy administration claims about the bailout, finding hard numbers is much more difficult. That's why, since the bailouts began in 2008, we've maintained a frequently updated site to provide them. Now we've retooled our database to make it even easier to find these sorts of answers.

So you can effortlessly discover that it's $27 billion for GM, $23 billion for AIG, $91 billion for Fannie, $51 billion for Freddie, and yes, the bank investments have so far returned a profit of $19 billion.

Big foreclosure payouts, but only for the right wrongs

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Can you put a price on the damage caused by a wrongful foreclosure? Banking regulators have. And it’s $125,000. Or $60,000. Or $15,000. Or… it’s unclear.

Last November, banking regulators launched a process to force the big banks to compensate homeowners victimized by their foreclosure abuses. Many crucial details remained unclear, including how much victims might receive.

More than seven months later, regulators finally released a “framework” that shows some of the possible outcomes. It’s a list of thirteen mortgage servicing “errors,” each with its own associated form of compensation. In addition to fixing the bank’s errors, remedies include cash payments ranging from $500 all the way up to $125,000.

It turns out that, for homeowners seeking compensation for those errors and abuses, it’s crucially important just how the servicer messed up. The logic for the differences in payment isn’t always apparent and in some instances seems to defy common sense.

Why loan modification scams are booming

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:24:00 +0000

During the go-go years of the real estate bubble, shady mortgage brokers thrived, thanks to the sluggish response of regulators and law enforcement agencies. Amid the ruins of the crash, there's a new boom attracting unscrupulous mortgage professionals: "Foreclosure rescue" companies promising -- in exchange for a large upfront fee -- to persuade lenders to modify desperate homeowners' mortgages. And authorities are again finding themselves ill-equipped to deal with the deluge.

In a giant game of whack-a-mole, law enforcement agencies at all levels across the country have filed suit against 150 such companies, but they continue to proliferate, and the number of consumer complaints continues to rise.

"This is a very big scam," says California Attorney General Jerry Brown. "They're all over the place, and as soon as you get one, they migrate to somewhere else."

The case of one particularly aggressive firm, 21st Century Legal Services, shows just how ineffective authorities' moves against the companies often are.