“It turns up being a joke…in a sick, sad kind of way.” As Americans return to their desks from the Thanksgiving holiday, they are learning about a tragic comedy that is indeed playing out in Washington D.C. Two people claim to run the federal agency devoted to protecting consumers from [Keep reading]
Here’s a question with a seemingly complex answer: Why is my credit card interest rate so high? After all, when banks pay consumers interest, the rate is a fraction of 1%. With car loans home loans, rates are 5 percent or less for buyers with good credit. So why is [Keep reading]
One of the themes of my Restless Project is that American consumers today are subject to major forces they can neither see, nor understand, nor plan for, and that’s a great source of day-to-day anxiety. Examples are all around us. Here’s one: Pew recently found that 46 percent of Americans [Keep reading]
Standard Oil committed many sins on the way to infamy, and Teddy Roosevelt’s s&*t list, but a big one was “vertical integration.” Rockefeller’s people owned oil refineries, and trucks that delivered gasoline, and the gas stations that sold it, and so on. It owned businesses up and down the supply [Keep reading]
You’ve probably heard of something called the “small sample size” problem. Well, if you are shopping for health care right now, that’s you. And that’s why it’s stupid to buy health insurance. To be more precise, I mean shopping for health insurance is a fairly futile, stupid exercise. Insurance companies [Keep reading]
For many years, the end of every scammer’s story — the sweatheart scam, the fake eBay product, the lottery “winnings” — went something like this: “Just wire me the money through Western Union.” Western Union is now paying a price for being so popular with criminals — $586 million. And [Keep reading]
I first met Rich Cordray the night before the first-ever Ohio state Consumer Protection Summit in Columbus back in 2010. It was long before the CFPB existed, and even longer before he would be considered for the job as America’s top consumer advocate. My book Stop Getting Ripped Off had [Keep reading]
Is renting (a home) the new buying? Single-family rentals—either detached homes or townhomes—are developing faster than any other portion of the housing market. These rentals outpace both single-family home purchases and apartment-style living, according to the Urban Institute. “Almost all the housing demand in recent years has been filled by [Keep reading]
Wait, someone has my salary information? Essentually, my actual pay stubs? What I earn, what I pay for health care,what my taxes are? And they sell that data? To debt collectors? And…it’s Equifax? You mean, THAT Equifax? That was the collective voice of the Internet this weekend when Redditors discovered [Keep reading]
Analytics are everywhere. And they’re great, unless you’re the one on the wrong side of the spreadsheet sort. Data doesn’t solve all problems, however – data, like photographs, can lie. It can certainly lead you astray. We all know that perfect is often the enemy of good. But sometimes, “good [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan