FACT CHECK: Fact Checking Rachel Maddow’s Claim About Student Loans
Maddow made the claim during a recent episode of her show, 'The Rachel Maddow Show,' on MSNBC
The Feds Gave Banks Woke Censorship Tools To Control All Your Money
The same government pressure erecting an Iron Curtain around the Internet is also constructing a financial social credit system like Communist China's inside the United States.Pastor ‘Exiles’ Family To Kenya To Escape Canadian Persecution Of Christians
For peaceably assembling to petition his government, Rev. Harold Ristau says, he was threatened with the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his life’s savings.Bank of America hit with $250 million in penalties after allegedly denying customers promised cash rewards, double-charging them, and damaging their credit scores
Federal regulators are penalizing Bank of America to the tune of $250 million for allegedly taking advantage of customers.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced Tuesday that the bank will pay over $100 million to the consumers who were adversely impacted and another $150 million in penalties to the CFPB and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The bank has been accused of "systematically double-dipping on fees imposed on customers with insufficient funds in their account, withholding reward bonuses explicitly promised to credit card customers, and misappropriating sensitive personal information to open accounts without customer knowledge or authorization."
CFPB director Rohit Chopra said in a statement, "These practices are illegal and undermine customer trust. The CFPB will be putting an end to these practices across the banking system."
The OCC similarly determined that the bank's double-dipping on fees was illegal.
As a result, the bank is required to pay $90 million in penalties to the CFPB and another $60 million to the OCC.
Bank of America had a policy whereby customers would be hit with a $35 charge if they had a transaction declined on account of insufficient funds in their account. With the alleged objective of harvesting junk fees, the bank would allow fees to be repeatedly charged for the same interactions and did so over a period of multiple years, according to the CFPB.
While allegedly double-dipping, the bank has also been accused of signing up tens of thousands of customers on false promises of cash rewards and points, then failing to follow through.
The CFPB's and OCC's penalties also reflect an alleged long-standing scheme undertaken by Bank of America employees that damaged customers' credit scores.
Since 2012, employees seeking to cut corners in order to hit incentive goals and satisfy evaluation criteria are said to have illegally used consumers' credit reports without their consent to apply for and enroll in credit card accounts. Although the bank employees appear to have benefited, the customers whose information was illegally used without their knowledge "were charged unjustified fees, suffered negative effects to their credit profiles, and had to spend time correcting errors."
Axios reported that while ostensibly different in scope, the details of this scandal are reminiscent of what Wells Faro was accused of in 2016.
Wells Fargo ended up agreeing in February 2020 to pay a $3 billion fine to settle the resultant civil lawsuit and to resolve a criminal prosecution filed by the Department of Justice, after it was discovered that bank employees opened millions of savings and checking accounts in the names of extant customers without their consent, reported NBC News.
The CFPB stressed that Bank of America has a long history of ripping off customers, having been forced to cough up $727 million to its victims for illegal credit card practices in 2014 and a fine of $225 million last year for "wrongfully freezing accounts" at the height of the pandemic.
This time around, Bank of America has been ordered to compensate the victims of the "unlawful non-sufficient fund fees who have not already been made whole by the bank." This approximate total is $80.4 million in consumer redress.
Customers owed bonuses who have not yet been compensated will similarly be made whole.
A CFPB spokesman told MarketWatch that customers affected by these alleged abuses don't have to do anything to get what's owed them.
"Depending on the circumstances of the consumer, Bank of America will deposit funds into the consumer's deposit account or will send the consumer a check," said the spokesman.
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The Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Sends Exactly The Wrong Message And Endangers The Economy
Normal people should be furious. Once again, the government changed the rules everyone lives by for a small, extremely wealthy, and politically connected group of people.Government should temporarily back all bank deposits, House Republican says
Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri believes that the U.S. government should temporarily offer blanket insurance for all bank deposits in a bid to prevent massive flows of funds from smaller banks to larger institutions amid widespread panic surrounding the financial system.
"If you don’t do this, there's going to be a run on your smaller banks," Luetkemeyer said, according to Politico, "Everyone's going to take their money out and run to the JPMorgan’s and these too-big-to-fail banks, and they're going to get bigger and everybody else is going to get smaller and weaker, and it's going really be bad for our system."
Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both collapsed recently, but while depositors who held funds at those institutions are being bailed out and will therefore not incur losses, the bank failures have sparked fears of contagion and further financial havoc.
"The thought process here is that this is a contagion that could be spread across the entire banking system if it's not contained and if people don't stop and and be calm about their assessment of the situation," the lawmaker said, according to the outlet. "This is a Chicken Little situation. You know, the sky is falling. Everybody runs around like that, the whole thing's going to implode."
Luetkemeyer, who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives for over a decade, suggested taking action by declaring that "for another 12 months here or six months, we're going to guarantee you every single deposit in this country and every bank until we get this interest rate situation resolved and these banks get back on solid footing." Politico reported that the lawmaker later altered his stance on the potential timeframe, with a spokesperson indicating that the guarantee could last "perhaps 30 to 60 days."
According to the outlet, the lawmaker claimed that "the system is sound" and "in better shape than it’s been in probably 20 years," though he also said that "we do have a few problems in it that need to be worked out."
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Don’t Blame Depositors For Bank Failure, Blame Biden And SVB Management
It’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things.Today's top stories
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