Recent Articles
As Citigroup prepares to take another huge hit due to subprime regular customers ask one question with a dose of reality. Will Citi raise credit card rates and other fees to make up for dismal earnings and huge losses? How vulnerable are exisitng customers? These are questions that were never asked in the past. Why bother? But other banks, such as HSBC, make some Citibank cardholders nervous. One HSBC customer who was never late and not overlimit saw his rate raised to 31 percent. When he asked why he was told it was a “business decision”, with no details provided. (see it)
Bank of America is making more changes although some may be lost in the news about BofA’s acquisition of Countrywide. Let us not overlook job losses as the bank said on Tuesday it would eliminate 650 corporate and investment banking jobs and sell its equity prime brokerage business. Bank of America will cut back operations in structured products such as mortgage and asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. That’s probably a good idea since very few trust the investments completely.
For the last hour we tried to access the First Horizon website to make a house payment. The website is not working. Whether you try http://www.firsthorizon.com/ or try it without the ‘www’ it makes no difference. You won’t be checking your account or making a payment because the First Horizon website is not working. We also tried our IP address locator, but the reply was the same: “We are unable to locate the address 208.223.181.200 at this time.”
This morning AFP reported that mortgage lenders targeted minorities and people with low incomes in recent years as the “best candidates” for subprime home loans. Also this morning, the New York Times says women were subprime targets. A very telling report, shown in detail by Household – HSBC Watch, shows how a military family was targeted (see it) while showing exactly how subprime loans worked. Clearly almost anyone could have been a subprime victim.