Consumption Rules

As interest rates continue their upward climb, spenders are starting to take a hit. That might be a good thing, considering last year the US savings rate was actually negative. One of the areas hardest hit for consumers is with their credit cards. While more than half of consumers pay off their balance each month, those that don’t can find themselves hurting for cash for a few different reasons. First of all, most of the major banks have increased their minimum payment requirements. [source] I think it was Congress that finally took action and started to realize that for those with significant balances (a not-so-surprisingly large number) it would, almost literally, take forever to pay off their balance by only paying the minimum.

Banks make their profits off of playing the interest rate game, and so they pay particular attention to where interest rates are and where they’re headed. (For more information, read the Federal Reserve’s annual report called The Profitability of Credit Card Operations of Depository Institutions) This is why many banks are converting many of their fixed-rate credit cards to variable rates (a rate that changes based on a given benchmark - usually the prime rate). [The Wall Street Journal] This transfers the interest-rate risk from the bank onto the consumer.

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Have you ever seen water flow uphill?

[read the full story here]

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By MONET M. RIVERA

“Manila, I keep coming back to Manila. Simply no place like Manila. Manila I’m coming home…”

- are the lines from the hit song of the band Hotdog entitled “Manila.” This was the first thing that came to my mind when I’m about to start my feature article on the city. A few minutes later, I found myself singing that part of the song, the only lyrics I could remember. Maybe because I was so young when it became a hit some years back. I asked my Mom about it and as she was singing it, I heard it and realized one thing – Manila, the city where I am living, has an everchanging and vibrant spirit which I couldn’t find somewhere else. I told myself that this song will inspire me to write beautiful things about Manila despite the pollution, crime, overpopulation and traffic congestion.

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I think America is a great role model for the world. It’s the best role model the world has got. You can consider Americans with national pride big-headed, that’s fine, but I think they have alot of reason to be proud of America. American pride is nothing compared to Samoan pride - yet none of us are accusing Samoans of being big-headed. America is the easiest to accuse because they’re the most prominent country in so many fields. Also, alot of people give extreme weight to the most recent foreign policies - including the War in Iraq - to say that America is trying to take over the world, or overstep its bounds. That is simply too narrow-minded a view.

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From FOXNews.com:

The filmmaker who ate nothing but McDonald’s meals for a month for his Oscar-nominated film “Super Size Me” gave a profanity-laced, politically incorrect speech at a suburban Philadelphia high school, but not everyone was lovin’ it.

Speaking at Hatboro-Horsham High School’s first-ever health fair, Morgan Spurlock joked about the intelligence of McDonald’s employees, about “retarded kids in the back wearing helmets” and teachers smoking pot in the balcony.

In the end, Spurlock had this to say about his speech: “The greatest lesson those kids learned today was the importance of free speech.”

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(Continuation of the discussion from: “the problem with sweatshops - there are too few”)

A great article about the pros and cons of sweatshops can be found at aworldconnected.org. Radley Balko argues that, although regrettably, sweatshops are a necessary step for developing countries in becoming developed and industrialized. Those that accept it eventually succeed economically, while those that protest sweatshop-like conditions lag behind:

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[from the FCC]

Per-channel or “a la carte” programming means a channel is offered on an individual per-channel basis rather than as part of a package or tier of programming. Cable television operators are not required to offer channels on an a la carte or individual basis. However, cable operators are free to offer channels other than those required to be on the basic tier on an a la carte basis. For example, premium movie services are often offered on an individual basis rather than as part of a package.

Earlier this year the FCC released a study on the effect of delivering “a la carte” cable choices to consumers. This new study [full text here] found that by offering cable channels individually, rather than bundled, cable companies could reduce rates by as much as 13%. This contradicted a study by the FCC a few years ago, under Michael Powell, that found opposite results [HERE].

With the newfound results, many people are again pushing congress to require cable operators to allow consumers to choose the channels that they subscribe to, including Arizona Senator John McCain, the Parent’s Television Council, and the Consumer’s Union. In my opinion, you have to allow consumers to choose for themselves what they watch, and just as importantly, what they pay for.

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“A government bureau is the closest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on earth.”

-Ronald Reagan

The Senate approved a $781 billion increase in the federal borrowing limit recently. Just what America needed: an increased credit limit for the federal government. What do consumers do when they get a credit line increase on their credit card? They max it out, just like the federal government will do with theirs.

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The Grameen Bank was started in the early 1970’s by a man by the name of Muhammad Yunus who wanted to do something to help the people from his native Bangladesh. Basically Grameen Bank provides unsecured loans to the poores