The country suffers from continuing high unemployment. The current official unemployment rate is 7.4%. The real unemployment rate is considerably higher because some unemployed people have stopped looking for work and don't get counted as unemployed. So, that's a lot of unemployed people. The unemployed people looking for work have trouble finding it in part […]
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In the three-and-half decades since enactment of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, airfares have plummeted in real terms. That reduction in price includes those dreaded fees for baggage, seat upgrades, etc., which make up only a small fraction of consumers' overall cost of travel. But beginning in 2009, fares began to creep up, as indicated […]
by Paul Alan Levy Clark Baker is a lone voice in the wilderness, proclaiming that the relationship of HIV to AIDS is a myth, that it is scientific fraud and the desire of big Pharma to pump up its profits that created this myth, and hence that there is nothing wrong with HIV positive people […]
by Brian Wolfman We've been covering the congressional debate over interest rates on students loans. (Go, for instance, here and here.) On Friday, President Obama signed the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013. It will bring most undergraduate loan rates below 4%. (Those rates were at 3.4% before July 1, when they doubled because Congress […]
by Paul Alan Levy A hundred fifty dollars. That is all it would take for the American Postal Workers Union to hire an outside mail service through which every one of the candidates in its internal union election, slated to begin one month from today, could email multiple campaign messages to every member for whom […]
Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Corvello v. Wells Fargo that when a bank tells a borrower it will modify his loan if certain conditions are met under the Treasury Department's Home Affordable Modification Program (“HAMP”), that promise is enforceable. When Phillip Corvello applied for a home loan modification, Wells Fargo set up a trial […]
As this story in the Guardian explains, Wal-Mart has agreed in a settlement to pay the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration a 190K fine and to improve worker safety at 2,800 of its stores. Here's an excerpt: Walmart has agreed to improve safety conditions at more than 2,800 stores in 28 US states after […]
The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department "has issued subpoenas to banks and other companies that handle payments for an array of financial offerings, ramping up an investigation that has been under way for several months." The investigation reportedly is focusing on companies that process payments for online payday lenders. Read the full story.
That's the name of this opinion piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel. It piece says that, in the U.S., "[a]s of 2011, nearly half the students enrolled in four-year programs — and more than 70 percent of students in two-year programs — failed to earn their degrees within that time, with many dropping out because of […]
We have been following the litigation over swipe fees–the fees that the card companies impose on merchants each time a credit or debit card is used. Go, for instance, here and here. A major concern is that if part of the swipe fee is the product of anti-competitive behavior or legislation or regulation enacted at the behest […]