Small businesspeople I spoke to over the past few days feel little love for their bank, or the banking system. “Every time I turn around they’re raising their fees just for our business checking account,”
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Fees are only one part of the problem. Several owners I spoke to talked about how difficult it has been to get loans, or how restrictive loan covenants had become. “My bank won’t even talk to me,” confessed the owner of one local eatery who had received a Small Business Administration loan nearly two years ago that financed an upgrade and expansion of his kitchen.
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As for my relationship with Wells Fargo, it endures. Our line of credit comes up in six months, and I’m expecting the bank to try to boost our interest rate, especially given how much it has complained about how it’s too low. Where we once bundled many of our services through Wells Fargo—including our corporate, commercial, and equipment lending and our 401(k) plan, a policy the bank encouraged to deepen our ties—we’re looking to back out of some pieces…

But unlike Clinton-era America, Switzerland got its medical act together.

It switched to a system that separates insurance from employment. Each individual or family is required to buy coverage, and insurers must offer a basic package of benefits to all applicants. They can’t profit from selling basic coverage, but they can from supplemental plans. Premiums are deducted from paychecks; the unemployed and poor are subsidized.

Despite opposition from insurers, drugmakers, and business, the plan passed by a bare majority and went into effect in 1996. Switzerland now spends 11% of its gross domestic product on health care, just as it did before. But everyone is covered, insurers are more profitable than ever, and its high-quality health care has been maintained.

The lesson, as laid out in The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, by T.R. Reid, is that “health-care systems can be changed, even in the face of powerful…interests.”
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Many Americans boast about having the best health care in the world, even though the U.N. ranks the U.S. system 37th, based on a broad range of measurements
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At the same time, he learned that almost all countries use one of four health-care models: Germany’s Bismarck system, in which hospitals and insurers are private entities and financing comes from payroll deductions; Britain’s Beveridge Model, with the government providing health care financed by taxes; the Canadian plan, where private doctors and hospitals are paid by the government through taxes; and the out-of-pocket care found in most poor nations, where those who can afford care get it, while the rest suffer or die. Unlike any other country, the U.S. combines all four models

Until the phone call, Rossie Anderson-Howze didn’t think she needed help negotiating her $12,000 in credit card debt. But when the company promised to cut the retiree’s 12.9 percent interest rate and save her $4,000 or her money back, she agreed to let Moneyworks LLC charge $1,090 to her card.

The company failed to deliver on its promises, she said, forcing Anderson-Howze, of St. Paul, to become one of hundreds of Minnesota consumers to seek help from Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson.

Swanson sued Moneyworks LLC and two other debt assistance companies on Tuesday, alleging that the companies made unsolicited phone calls promising lowered interest rates, guaranteed savings and money-back guarantees. Swanson alleges that Washington-based Priority Direct Marketing, Clear Financial Solutions of Florida and Moneyworks LLC, based in Georgia, “charged financially strapped people a lot of money to lower the interest rates on their credit cards, only they failed to do so, leaving people even further behind on their bills.”
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Swanson also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to adopt federal regulations to prohibit companies from charging consumers until services are delivered satisfactorily.

Five years ago, the Hildebrandt family of New Richmond, Wis., was juggling more than $100,000 in credit card and personal debt. Through frugality, determination and hard work, they are now — other than a mortgage — debt-free.
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Several steps were key to making the plan work. Kandy and Russell eliminated discretionary spending. Kandy began buying generic food and frequenting thrift stores for clothing purchases. They stopped exchanging Christmas and birthday gifts with each other and their relatives.

Even with the drastic cutbacks, the Hildebrandts couldn’t cover the $2,000 they were sending to CCCS each month to be distributed to their creditors. At that time, the sum amounted to about half of Russell’s take-home pay. So Russell took on a second job cleaning a local grocery store several nights a week from midnight to 4:30 a.m. He would arrive home from his day job, eat dinner, catch a few hours of sleep and head to work. After his shift, he would go back home, sleep a few more hours and then get up for his day job.
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By the fall of 2008, the Hildebrandts had one year to go on the payment plan. Russell even started daydreaming about a new home when he saw a three-bedroom rambler for sale in New Richmond. It had all that they were looking for, including a large yard and a separate bedroom for Joey. Russell let a real estate agent know that they liked the house, but added that the family would have to pay off their debts before taking on a mortgage.

Several months later the agent called and asked if the Hildebrandts would be interested in a rent-to-own agreement. The current owner of the house had some health concerns and was eager to move. The monthly rent would be $1,000, which included $200 to be escrowed for closing costs. They could manage it.

Earlier this year, the owner wanted to accelerate the sale process. In April, using the tax credit for first-time home buyers, the Hildebrandts were able to swing the purchase and pay off the remaining balances on their credit cards about six months ahead of schedule.

Americans are being forced to pay significantly higher swipe fees whenever they use their credit cards than any of their peers in the industrialized world, according to a report by the Merchants Payments Coalition.

The report, released Thursday by a coalition of retailers, supermarkets, drugstores and other businesses, found that Americans currently pay about $2 in “interchange” fees for every $100 they spend using credit cards. The fee is actually paid by retailers, though consumers feel it in a higher retail price. This rate is twice that charged in the U.K. and New Zealand, four times the rate levied in Australia and more than six times the cross-border rate charged in the European Union, the study says..
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“If we paid the same low credit- and debit-card swipe fees as consumers in Australia pay, then the net benefit for American consumers would have totaled $125 billion over the last four years,” the report says.

Warren Buffett tells CNBC that while the economy “hasn’t gotten worse” but also hasn’t “gotten much better” over the past three months, he doesn’t expect a ‘double-dip’ recession and sees significant improvement in residential real estate.
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BECKY: All right. Let me go at this another way. Let’s pretend you’re on a desert island for a month. There’s only one set of numbers you can get. What would it be?

BUFFETT: Well, I would probably look at– perhaps freight car loadings and– perhaps– and– and truck tonnage moved and– but I’d want to look at a lot of figures.
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BUFFETT: Well, I think that– unfortunately, I think that the — what– what– we’re really talking about reforming health insurance more than health care. So I– the incentives that produce the 16 or so percent of GDP that’s going to health care, I think unfortunately they’re getting– they’re going to get changed. But– so I think that we really– and I’m talking as much about reforming health care as we’re talking about reforming the insurance. And I think that will be an opportunity missed if we don’t do more about looking at what– what the incentives are in the present system and what they would be in an ideal system.

To mark National Consumer Week, here are five laws the canny shopper should be using in their battle to get stuff that actually works. There is a war being fought between customers and many of the firms they have to deal with. It is an asymmetric conflict – the little man versus the faceless, bad customer service monoliths.
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Your iconic white MP3 player, the totemic centre of your life, breaks down precisely 366 days after you bought it. The large electronics firm that sold you the MP3 player says that because the one-year guarantee had elapsed, there’s nothing they can do to help you. You’ll just have to buy another one.
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if the player has been lovingly treated and has still conked out that suggests something may have been wrong with it at the very beginning.

It works like this. For the first four-five weeks you have a “right of rejection” – if the item you’ve bought breaks down, you can demand a refund.

For the next six months, you are entitled to replacement or repair of the goods. It is up to the retailer to prove there was nothing wrong with it if they wish to get out of having to do the work. And then after six months, there is still a duty to replace or repair faulty goods, but the onus is on you, the consumer, to prove that there was something wrong.

And the key time span is six years. That’s how long goods may be covered by the Sale of Goods Act. It all depends on what “sufficiently durable” means. If a light bulb goes after 13 months, the consumer is not going to be overly gutted.

Year-to-date, however, emerging markets were still up 51%. While Eastern European and Latin American markets continued to record positive returns, Asian markets, as represented by the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan index lost 3%.
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In Mexico, GDP contracted 10% y-o-y in the second quarter of 2009 as a result of the global economic crisis and swine flu outbreak. In comparison, GDP fell 8% in the first quarter of the year. Declines in the manufacturing, construction and retail sectors had negatively impacted GDP during the period.
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Since 1995, portfolio inflows into emerging markets have totaled more than US$123 billion. A significant amount, considering it includes the US$49 billion in net outflows in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis. The recovery in emerging markets and hunt for attractive investment opportunities, however, saw these funds return just as quickly with inflows totaling more than US$44 billion in the first seven months of 2009, nearly 90% of the outflows registered all of last year.
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Emerging markets account for more than 80% of the world’s population. With economic growth accelerating and population growth decelerating, per capita income is one the rise. In our view, markets such as China, India and Brazil stand at the front of the class.
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As of end-August 2009, the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets index had a P/E of 16 times, cheaper than the MSCI World index which was trading at a P/E of 21 times.

Pressure to distort or fudge statistics likely comes from up high — and it’s intense. “China announces its annual objective of GDP growth rate each year. In Chinese culture, the government has to reach the objective; otherwise, they will ‘lose face,'” said Gary Liu, deputy director of the China Europe International Business School’s Lujiazui International Financial Research Center. “For instance, the government announced that it wanted to ensure a GDP growth rate of 8 percent in 2009, and it has become the priority for government officials to meet that objective.”

But local and provincial governmental officials are the ones who actually fiddle with the numbers. They retain considerable autonomy and power, and have a self-interested reason to manipulate economic statistics. When they reach or exceed the central government’s economic goals, they get rewarded with better jobs or more money. “The higher [their] GDP [figures], the higher the chance will be for local officials to get promoted,” explained Liu.
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Last October, Vice Premier Li Keqiang said in a speech after inspecting China’s Statistics Bureau, “China’s foundation for statistics is still very weak, and the quality of statistics is to be further improved” — a brutally harsh assessment coming from a top state official.
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China’s economy grew at an annualized 6.1 percent rate in the first quarter, and 7.9 percent in the second. Yet electricity usage, a key indicator in industrial growth and a harder metric to manipulate, declined 2.2 percent in the first six months of the year. How could an economy largely dependent on manufacturing grow while its industrial sector shrank? It couldn’t; the numbers don’t add up