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Posts Tagged ‘Larry Summers’

Although the Federal Reserve finalized new regulations that will limit various credit-card rate increases last December, the rules won’t come into effect until July 2010, and there is now mounting pressure to implement the regulations at a much earlier date.

Not surprisingly, the banking industry says that both the White House and Congress should wait for the Fed’s new rules to take effect before taking any additional action, and Edward Yingling, who is president of the American Bankers Association, said last Sunday, “The banking industry understands the concerns about credit cards, but the administration should fully recognize the impact of the Federal Reserve Board regulation, which is one of the strongest consumer protection regulations ever adopted. As we go forward we need to be careful about piling on rules that very much may have the impact of restraining the availability of credit”.

Democratic lawmakers have already begun advancing legislation that would limit certain credit card fees and other practices and Larry Summers, who is scheduled to meet with the heads of several of the largest U.S. credit card issuers at the White House on Thursday, recently said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’, “The president is going to be very focused, in a very near term, on a whole set of issues having to do with credit-card abuses”, and then added, “their abuses include charging consumers extraordinarily high rates that they wouldn’t have paid if they knew what they were getting themselves into”.

Summers’s comments were also underlined by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki who said, “Addressing abuse in the credit card industry and standing up for consumers is a priority for the president and his economic team, and we look forward to working with Congress on these issues”.

Whereas banks claim that market conditions and changes in borrowers’ credit scores necessitated the increases, consumer advocates want new legislation that would not only limit rate increases on existing balances, but would also require credit card companies to provide more information on their rates, and they are particularly critical of banks that raised interest rates whilst receiving federal bailout funds.

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Rahm Emanuel, who is the White House chief of staff recently said on ABC’s, “This Week” program, that he believes, “we will be able to avoid the temporary nationalization of the nineteen weakest of the big banks”, and added that he didn’t envisage that it would be necessary for the administration to ask for any additional funding, since several banks are already preparing to repay loans that they recently received.

Emanuel’s remarks were reinforced by those of Lawrence Summers, who is National Economic Council director, who said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, “we won’t have to get more money because there’s the capacity to turn to the private market first for firms needing more capital. The government can also deploy if necessary additional taxpayer cash, which is likely be buttressed over time by lenders that are in the strongest position of paying back U.S. money”.

Financial regulators and The U.S. Treasury are presently clashing with each other as to how to disclose the results of stress tests that are scheduled to be released May 4, because several officials are concerned about the potential damage that could be caused to the weaker institutions if it’s not done correctly.

The intention of the tests, is to clarify which of nineteen companies that include Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., GMAC LLC and MetLife Inc., have enough capital to weather a deeper economic downturn, should it in fact occur, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and other regulators would prefer that less details about the assessments be publicized, whilst the Treasury would prefer more.

The first of two major dangers that is envisaged, is that if all the banks pass the tests with clean bills of health, then the credibility of the tests themselves will suspect, especially since the economy has worsened since the Treasury announced the tests in February, causing questions to be raised about whether the checks that regulators are presently applying to bank portfolios are exacting enough. The second danger is that if some banks fail the tests, then investors can be expected to punish them, by refusing to invest in them, thereby causing them even greater problems.

The nineteen financial institutions are all expected to get the preliminary results of the tests as early as April 24, and any banks deemed to be weak, and in need of additional capital will be given six months to raise additional funds.

President Barack Obama said at a news conference in Trinidad and Tobago on April 19, that “the tests will show that different banks are in different situations”, and he pledged that no new injections of government money would, “go into a black hole where you aren’t going to see results or some exit strategy so the taxpayers ultimately are relieved of these burdens”.

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