How much Kool-Aid does the sainted Warren Buffett expect his disciples to drink? You could easily choke on yesterday’s dose. He wants you to think that all is ethically fine and dandy at Berkshire Hathaway, after a top executive’s questionable stock trades and sudden resignation. Buffett’s press release on the departure basically said, “Trust me, shut up, and forget about it.”

Sorry, Warren. You send morality memos to your managers, warning them to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But this counts as your own third breach in a mere 12 months. You don’t seem to notice that you’ve become the Offender in Chief.

The story so far:… continue reading

Modern divorce is not about who was the meanest or who slept where. It’s about the money. Both spouse’s income and assets are – or should be – on the table. But couples don’t always know a lot about each other’s finances, or where to look. They might not even realize how much less they’re worth, due to the squeeze on incomes and the housing depression.

Divorce rates fall during hard times because couples can’t afford the split. But for people quitting anyway, the struggle ramps up. Here are 10 tips for getting the most out of a diminished marital pot:… continue reading

The big banks are threatening to hit you with fees for using your debit card. JPMorgan Chase fired the first shot across the bow last week, by canceling its debit-card rewards program.

Why is this happening? Because the banks lost an epic battle with retailers, which will force them to slash the fees they collect on all debit-card transactions. As we speak, they’re trying to get Congress let the high fees stand, and you’re collateral damage in the fight. If they can’t collect more from the merchants, the banks are warning, they’ll collect more from you.

Could they get away with it? Maybe, in the short run. In the long run, however, however, consumers will find no-fee options from other institutions. Debit cards are more popular than cash or credit. The last thing banks should want is for you to put your cards away.

The debit-card story starts with the interchange networks, which carry the transactions between store and bank and are dominated by MasterCard and Visa. They charge merchants high, monopolistic fees – around 1 to 2 percent of each debit purchase, for an average of about 44 cents. That fee – called a “swipe fee” – is paid to the card-issuing banks and totaled more than $16 billion in 2009. Consumers shoulder the expense, in the form of higher retail costs for goods and services.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act  recognized that competition among the interchange networks didn’t really exist.  An amendment sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) told the Federal Reserve to set a reasonable cap on swipe fees, which the Fed decided was 12 cents tops. The banks screamed to Congress, warning that – if the rule went through – they’ll take the rest of their $16 billion out of the hides of their customers. The caps will be finalized next month and take effect in July.

Bank supporters in both houses of Congress have introduced legislation to delay the caps, so they can be reconsidered. But “the goal of the industry is not delay, it’s repeal,” says Ed Mierzwinski, director of the consumer program for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Banks want to keep their cushy deal.

It’s not at all clear, however, that you will actually be stung in the wallet, if lower caps go through. Here are six things to watch for:… continue reading

When a wealthy man (it’s usually a man) has creditors on his trail, he’ll probably try to protect some assets by transferring them to his wife. If it works, his wife will be richer than she was before. On the downside, the law might come after her, too – wanting the money back.

That’s what’s happening to the wives of two top executives of the failed Washington Mutual Bank, which was seized by the government in September, 2008. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued their husbands – former CEO Kerry Killinger and former COO Stephen Rotella — in federal court in Seattle last week, for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty in their management of the bank. WaMu’s Home Loan President David Schneider was also charged. The government reportedly seeks to recover $900 million from the execs, for the bank’s bondholders and other creditors.

Killinger and Rotella switched valuable property into their wives’ names, directly or in trust – an action that, potentially, could protect it from any judgments against them. So the FDIC slapped the wives – Linda Killinger and Esther Rotella – with a lawsuit, too. It also asked the court to freeze the transferred assets, so they couldn’t be disbursed while the case is going on…. continue reading

Is Wall Street reform already dead? The bankers and other gazillionaires are back in the driver’s seat, in Washington D.C. For you and me, that means taking a more conservative stance with our personal money. Unbridled speculation and financial deceit brought us the Great Economic Collapse of 2008. If the new Congress undermines the Dodd-Frank reform law passed in 2009 – and it has a good start – it will happen again.

Americans are too worried about their income and jobs to think about how fast the moneybag bosses reasserted their rule over Congress. As long as they’re effectively in charge of federal legislation, it pays to hold your spending down, build your savings up, and – at older ages – invest more of your money for steady income after you retire. Oil shocks and shocks from the nuclear tragedy in Japan will pass. But the financial world will never stablize until the the global gamblers – in the form of our bullying too-big-to-fail banks and other perps – are finally brought to heel.

At the moment, the dominant conservatives in Congress aren’t reversing the Dodd-Frank reforms. Instead, they’re cutting the budget in ways that will stop those laws from being carried out. Framing the hit job as “budget cutting” sounds good to taxpayers. In fact, these cuts are good only for Wall Street, not for Americans at large.

First up is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal regulator so esoteric that gutting it will be a cinch. How could the average voter even understand what it does, let alone worry about whether Congress is taking its powers away? Yet here lies the beating heart of what led the financial system to implode…. continue reading