Those without a bank account likely face high check-cashing fees, including for federal stimulus and child tax credit checks.

Roughly 8.8% of households in metro Detroit haven’t taken what financial experts call the first step toward economic inclusion.

They don’t have bank accounts.

And it's costing them big money to cash checks and borrow money outside the traditional banking system.

Need to cash your $1,400 stimulus check? Call a local party store or check cashing store in metro Detroit, and it could cost you $60 to $100 in fees. The bigger the check, the more money you’re handing over if the fee is based on a percentage of the check’s dollar amount.

Gillibrand is asking Congress for $6 million to test whether a non-profit bank located in a post office would help customers in underserved communities.

WASHINGTON, D.C., DC — U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called on Congress to fund a pilot program that would implement a postal banking system.

"In 2015, the US Postal Service Office of the Inspector General found that offering these expanded financial services at the US Postal Service would generate $1.1 billion in annual revenue for the US Postal Service after five years," Gillibrand said during a news conference Thursday in Washington D.C.

A Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study found in 2017 that nearly 63 million adults are considered "underbanked." The majority of those underbanked citizens live in rural areas or low-income urban neighborhoods of color.

The Federal Trade Commission is a bipartisan federal agency with a unique and important mission: protect consumers and promote competition. In 2020, the FTC continued to promote competition by challenging harmful mergers and anticompetitive business conduct that harms consumers. As part of its active merger enforcement agenda, the Commission sued to block or unwind an unprecedented nine mergers and negotiated settlements to prevent harm in another 12 transactions. Ten other deals were abandoned in the face of antitrust concerns raised in FTC investigations.

The Commission also continued to build on its track record of aggressive and innovative non-merger antitrust enforcement, including a complaint against defendants Martin Shkreli and Kevin Mulleady along with the companies they used to protect a 4000% price increase on a life-saving drug, as well as the groundbreaking monopolization case against Facebook for illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly, which seeks to unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

While major credit card issuers tightened lending standards and slashed credit limits amid COVID-19, some financial technology startups took a different tack.

In 2020, young companies like Grow Credit, TomoCredit and Chime launched or expanded credit cards that are available to those with less-than-ideal credit — because they don’t run a credit check at all. Instead of relying on the traditional FICO credit scoring model, these “fintech” products can evaluate alternative factors like bank accounts and money management to determine eligibility.

What’s more, these cards don’t feature annual fees or even APRs. It’s literally not possible to carry a balance on them.

Here’s how this new breed of credit cards differs from traditional cards and why they’re easier to get, even in tough times.

Credit card delinquency rates, as measured by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for accounts that are 90 days or more late in making payments, have ebbed and flowed with economic conditions over the decades but reached their all time peak during the financial crisis in Q4 of 2009 when they reached an eye-popping 11.0%1. Following that dark financial chapter Americans steadily deleveraged (paid down their outstanding credit card balances) for several years, going from a brief high of just over $1 trillion2 before the beginning of the crisis in December 2008 to less than $800 billion3 in the years following.

In the intervening years outstanding card balances stayed relatively flat but began to consistently build again as the economy slowly rebounded beginning in 2014, reaching $975 billion in Q4 of 20204. With growing credit card balances, delinquency rates began creeping up mid-decade, though well below alarming levels seen during the previous decade. Delinquency rates have dropped dramatically in the past year due to the pandemic, however,

The Federal Reserve’s latest weekly survey showed that the 25 largest banks in the U.S. reduced their loan-to-deposit ratio to 53.9 percent, the lowest in the 36 years that the data has been collected, Bloomberg reported on Monday (April 12). 

Together, the banks dropped loan holdings by 8 percent in the past year through March, the Fed data show. Total loans fell by $447 billion to $5.45 trillion, and total deposits increased 16 percent to $10.13 trillion.

The share of safe assets dropped to 35.6 percent in the week that ended March 31 from 36.0 percent the previous week, the Fed reported, per Bloomberg. Safe assets are low-risk investments like cash, Treasuries and securities. Total assets dropped to $20.91 trillion from $21.04 trillion. 

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Derek Taylor and Darnell Parker, founders of Ingenious Financial

Arlington, VA — Executives at Ingenious Financial have announced plans to raise $10 billion in capital to invest in unbanked and underserved communities. Darnell Parker, founder of Ingenious Financial, and Derek Taylor, Chief Operating Officer, said the $10 billion will fund the capital disbursement towards the following four initiatives:

• $4 billion for the financial institution and holding company

• $5 billion for technology products, smartphones, and broadband service

• $600 million to lease nationwide training facilities

• $400 million to hire 500 employees nationwide to train how to use a smartphone and teach financial literacy

While leading the Biden administration’s watchdog of Wall Street, Gensler is expected to toughen aspects of oversight that were eased during the Trump administration.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed Gary Gensler, a former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a 53-45 vote.

Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs partner, has broad experience in financial regulation serving Democratic administrations and is expected to tighten regulation of Wall Street. While chair of the CFTC from 2009 until 2014, Gensler led a transformation of the $400 trillion swaps market. He also helped craft the Dodd-Frank law, the main legislative response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.