The Credit Card Crunch

For the sake of satire: The Bat Credit Card / From deviantart.com

I came across this post from Huffington Post where Arianna Huffington discusses about the impending crunch in the credit cards – interest rates can be jacked up by these credit card companies. And why they do that for? Simple: To earn profit in your account.

Here is a snippet from her post:

It’s a particularly vicious economic circle: every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials like food, housing, and medical care — the costs of which continue to escalate. But as their debt rises, they find it harder to keep up with their payments. When they don’t, banks, trying to offset losses in other areas, then turn around and hike interest rates and impose all manner of fees and penalties… all of which makes it even less likely consumers will be able to pay off their mounting debts.

Alarming? Yes. And pretty downright scary too. This can be an economic nightmare for America – the nation that is swimming in the pool of credits and debts. And not only that – it could fall out to the other parts of the world – especially to economies that are credit-dependent. WTF.

In relation to this, here are the stuff worth reading:

The Credit Card Debt Crisis: The Next Economic Domino

Credit Card Companies Gouge Huffposters

Consumerism Will Come to An End…Eventually

I found this clip over Yahoo Finance and Howard Davidowitz is saying it right.

Click on this link for the video.

From the article itself:

• An $8 trillion negative wealth effect from declining home values.
• A $10 trillion negative wealth effect from weakened capital markets.
• A $14 trillion consumer debt load amid “exploding unemployment”, leading to “exploding bankruptcies.”

Yes, America, you will be starting to save and living in survival mode. You only need food, a roof above your head, a school to send your children and grandchildren to and your mom or pop’s old car.

So what is wrong with living a simple life? There is nothing wrong with it. What’s wrong is to live in the pool of lies and credit card debts – our heads filled with the “American Dream” that we have before.

Wake up folks. Its time to live simply and get our assess to work. To be resourceful and creative during these times. It not the end of the world yet. It is a start of a new way of living. Dont fall in to the predatory credit cards and pre-need bitches.

Wake up and smell the coffee. Start saving money for the rainy days.

Source article: http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/176478/%22Worst-Is-Yet-to-Come%22-Americans%27-Standard-of-Living-Permanently-Changed?tickers=WMT,WFMI,FDO,^GSPC,^DJI,RTH

The Obama Stimulus Plan

President Obama’s stimulus plan has been the talk of the town for a while and has been debated endlessly by Republicans and Democrats alike, weighing on the pros and cons of the plan. The economy has been in a rollercoaster spin and President Obama, has been pitching his efforts to pass the stimulus plan.

The Obama stimulus plan is no doubt bigger than the stimulus plan Bush and Paulson initiated last year. It may have the bigger risk and the bigger pros and cons but I am still hoping that President Obama can pull it off better than that Bush and Paulson did. What we need here is the transparency in spending – the American people should know where every cent of their tax money went – to provide good and transparent accountability. As well as preventing those large and greedy corporations take a their own lion’s share in the stimulus money.

From a CNN article:

“My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs, we are making sure that the financial system is working again, that homeowners are getting some relief,” he said in his first prime time news conference.

Well, President Obama, you have a tough job to do – and a lot of expectations to meet and doubts to break. People are getting a lot of headaches with the tough economic times. But I do hope that the stimulus package that you are proposing will not benefit only those who sit in their fat assess in those magnificent buildings in wall street. Your stimulus package should benefit the American people – and get started to get out of this dark times of recession.

No More Golden Parachutes

In a bold move today, US president Barack Obama announced that he will limit executive pay to $500,000 if the companies will seek bailout using the taxpayer’s money.

In a CNN article ;

Pledging to take “the air out of golden parachutes,” President Obama announced Wednesday that executives of companies receiving federal bailout money will have their pay capped at $500,000 under a revised financial compensation plan.

Last year’s “shameful” handout of $18 billion in Wall Street bonuses “is exactly the kind of disregard for the costs and consequences of their actions that brought about this crisis: a culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else,” Obama said to reporters at the White House.

I consider this move to be very bold and I know that it points to the proper direction. Executive pay should be limited and instead the money being used to benefit only the few, why not use it to improve the company as well as additional benefits for the other employees. And if the companies seek bailout, then they should be able to make beneficial improvements to the way they run their corporations.

Enough of the greed among the corporate elite. Anyways, they were not hired just to lay there corporate assess and do nothing while their company falls down. They are hired for that executive position because they have the higher capacity on how to run the company – PROPERLY AND IN A NON-GREEDY WAY.

I hope this thing keeps up. And I hope President Obama will fully implement this. Keep it up President Obama!