The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act stands as one of the most complicated pieces of legislation ever devised. The law includes more than 22,000 pages of rules, which is equivalent to about 15 copies of Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace. These guidelines tell banks how much money they must set aside, how they can advertise, what sort of investments they can make, and many other stipulations and requirements.
As you can imagine, keeping track of all those regulations Continue reading
Formed in 2011 with the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aims to keep citizens safe from unfair or deceptive practices by businesses. One of the ways the government organization accomplishes this task is by maintaining a database of complaints made by consumers against companies. And people have certainly taken advantage of this service since its creation two years ago. In that time, the CFPB has received more than 700,000 complaints aimed primarily at Continue reading
If you’re in need of cash in a pinch, you’d better hope that your bank has an ATM located nearby. For the 10th consecutive year, the fees charged by banks for usage of ATMs by non-customers has risen to a record average of $4.57. That number is actually the combination of two separate fees: one charged by ATM owners for non-customers and another by the account holder’s bank for withdrawing out-of-network. In 1998 the combination of these charges amounted to Continue reading
When the stock market collapsed in 2008, the government deemed Wall Street’s ailing banks “too big to fail” and provided them with a multi-billion dollar bailout. The emergency loan ultimately saved the banks, but has provided no shortage of controversy ever since. To the financial sector’s critics, many of the problems caused by these banks stemmed from their enormous size. In fact, nothing much has changed since the financial collapse: the same five banks that dominated bond underwriting and Continue reading