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So, a customer goes to a business to purchase a product. The business refuses to sell. The customer asks why. The business says, however politely, “Because we don’t approve of you.”And the business gets in trouble, right florists, wedding hall operators and cake-bakers of America? Actually, we’ll see about that. Google announced Wednesday it no longer would allow online or payday lenders to advertise on its websites. Online loans join firearms, explosives and illicit drugs as products the search engine giant refuses to tout. Facebook also bans selling ads to online lenders, but Yahoo and other providers still do. It’s...

New car loans have become the new hot product and Wall Street, not car-loving Americans, is the real market. The growth of student loan debt has received no shortage of attention from politicians and the media in recent years, making it one of the top economic anxieties in post-mortgage-meltdown America. Behind the front-page investigations and populist political platforms, the numbers are indisputably chilling: student loan balances have surged from less than $18,000 per person to $25,000 per person in the ten years since 2005. But another class of debt is also growing at troubling rates without attracting anywhere near the...

Hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers will now have an easier path to getting their loans discharged, the Obama administration announced Tuesday. The Department of Education will send letters to 387,000 people they’ve identified as being eligible for a total and permanent disability discharge, a designation that allows federal student loan borrowers who can’t work because of a disability to have their loans forgiven. The borrowers identified by the Department won’t have to go through the typical application process for receiving a disability discharge, which requires sending in documented proof of their disability. Instead, the borrower will simply have...

Hundreds of thousands of borrowers who are permanently disabled could have an estimated $7.7 billion in student loans forgiven, the Department of Education announced Tuesday. Starting next week, the Department of Education will send letters to 387,000 people who have been identified as eligible for what is called a "Total and Permanent Disability" loan discharge because they are disabled and cannot work. The Department of Education and Social Security Administration worked together to identify borrowers who have been receiving disability payments and are eligible to have their loans discharged.

Following SCOTUS' decision not to hear a case making it easier to get rid of student debt, and The White House's push to ease student loan 'burdens', WSJ reports a federal judge ruled law-school graduates who file for bankruptcy protection can cancel the debt they racked up while studying for the bar exam. In an opinion filed Thursday, Judge Carla Craig of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn, N.Y., said bar-exam loan debt is “a product of an arm’s-length agreement on commercial terms” and doesn’t fall into the category of student loans that stick with a borrower who files...

I heard an excerpt of Hillary! last night where she was decrying the fact that the Government profits, from the interest, off students who have loans. Wasn't it Obama, early in his first term, that confiscated the Student Loan Program from the banks?

Uh oh - here we go again. Do you remember the subprime mortgage meltdown during the last financial crisis? Well, now a similar thing is happening with auto loans. The auto industry has been doing better than many other areas of the economy in recent years, but this "mini-boom" was fueled in large part by customers with subprime credit. According to Equifax, an astounding 23.5 percent of all new auto loans were made to subprime borrowers in 2015. At this point, there is a total of somewhere around $200 billion in subprime auto loans floating around out there, and...

Remember Obama phones? Now it's Obama loans. The Obama administration is trying to muscle in on the small-dollar loan market, in part by muscling out the online lending industry. It is ordering banks to go against the advice of their regulators and step up small-dollar lending to economically disadvantaged customers. It's toying with the idea of offering banking services, including consumer loans, through the Postal Service. And this week we learned the Treasury Department is asking for $10 million to provide small loans to people with questionable credit through community development organizations. It's ACORN going into the payday loan business....

Bought a 2007 Subaru Forester 5K cash, 150K miles earlier this year against my better judgement--hubs was insistent it was reliable. They USED to be reliable. I had an 88 Justy that you couldn't kill. BTW I live in upstate NY with its harsh winters. Seems they now have major engine problems. Something I've found out the hard way. Any recommendations on a new car?

Completes seventh non-performing loan sale. Freddie Mac announced late Friday that it sold $305 million in seriously delinquent loans from its mortgage investment portfolio. The sale, which was initially announced last month, was completed via auction, with two pools containing 1,611 total loans being sold to a pair of buyers. According to Freddie Mac, these loans have been delinquent for approximately two years, on average. In its announcement, Freddie Mac said that given the deep delinquency status of the loans, the borrowers have likely been evaluated previously for or are already in various stages of loss mitigation, including modification or...

College Tuition and Fees constitute one of the biggest threats to our economic outlook. Here is a chart of data from the relevant Consumer Price Index sub-component reaching back to 1978, the earliest year Uncle Sam provides a breakout for College Tuition and Fees. As an interesting sidebar, we've thrown in the increase in the cost of purchasing a new car as well as the more substantial increase for the broader category of medical care, both of which pale in comparison.

Abengoa, a renewable energy multinational company headquartered in Spain, has been a favorite of the Obama administration in getting federal tax money for clean energy projects. Since 2009, Abengoa and its subsidiaries, according to estimates, have received $2.9 billion in grants and loan guarantees through the Department of Energy to undertake solar projects in California and Arizona—as well as the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas. But in the space of less than a year, Abengoa’s financial health has become critical, leading investors to worry whether the company can survive. The company’s stock price on NASDAQ has swooned—from...

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, upon passing on a run for the Republican nomination in 2012, took an interesting career turn. The famously fiscally conservative executive, who devised savings for the Hoosier state on everything from ??? to paper clips, became the head of Purdue University. Since then, Daniels has endured the predictable run-ins with his liberal faculty—over criticism of Howard Zinn’s American history— but also made real progress in the fight against rising college costs by harnessing some free-market incentives for academia.The university is now in its fourth year of a tuition freeze after more than 30 yearly...

A proposal in Seattle meant to increase homeownership among Muslims by offering financing compliant with strict Islamic law -- known as Sharia -- is gaining ground in the latest test for local leaders trying to accommodate diverse religious beliefs. "We will work to develop new tools for Muslims who are prevented from using conventional mortgage products due to their religious beliefs," Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said during a press conference July 13. "Sharia," which comes from the Koran and means "the right path," prohibits the payment of interest -- the primary way lenders earn. Many of Seattle's 30,000 practicing Muslims,...

SEATTLE, Wash. — The mayor of Seattle and his housing committee have unveiled a plan to increase housing in the city, with a portion of the plan proposing the offering of Sharia law-compliant loans for Muslim residents. Among the number of ideas offered to make housing more affordable for Seattle residents is a segment that addresses Muslim beliefs, as Sharia law forbids usury for its adherents. “For our low—and moderate—income Muslim neighbors who follow Sharia law—which prohibits the payment of interest or fees for loans of money—there are limited options for financing a home,” the proposed plan reads. “Some Muslims...

In a dangerous deja vu, politicians and lobbyists are pressuring banks to throw open their lending windows for credit-poor people who want to buy homes but may not be able to afford them. Worried about sagging homeownership rates, especially among minorities, the Obama administration seeks to boost homebuying by easing mortgage lending standards — and affordable-housing zealots are egging it on. So are Realtors and brokers hungry for profits. They're all cheering recent moves by Obama regulators to slash down-payment and mortgage insurance requirements for first-time homebuyers at federal agencies that back such mortgages. They also support a plan to...

The Export-Import Bank charter will expire in a few days, on June 30, unless Congress acts to reauthorize it. The Export-Import Bank was created more than 80 years ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help foreign customers buy goods from the United States. Some companies benefit from the Export-Import Bank and they are the first ones to defend its reauthorization. But let’s be clear: Companies benefit from Export-Import Bank loans at the expense of taxpayers and other businesses. Taxpayers—not the companies themselves—assume the risk of a foreign loan, made through a private bank (like Goldman Sachs), to purchase a...

Cash-strapped consumers are being shown a new place to find money: their driveways. Short-term lenders, seeking a detour around newly toughened restrictions on payday and other small loans, are pushing Americans to borrow more money than they often need by using their debt-free autos as collateral. So-called auto title loans — the motor vehicle version of a home equity loan — are growing rapidly in California and 24 other states where lax regulations have allowed them to flourish in recent years. Their hefty principal and high interest rates are creating another avenue that traps unwary consumers in a cycle of...

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business. Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...