There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
The corrupt agency which was the ‘brainchild’ of Senator Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA) could be on its last legs.
Politico reported this morning that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, who is also the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), has choked off the flow of all new funding to the agency.
Vought was chosen to take over from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as interim head, who had temporarily led the agency after President Donald Trump fired its previous director, Rohit Chopra.
Vought argued in a Saturday evening X post that CFPB has more than $700 million in the bank and went on to proclaim that the “spigot is being turned off.”
“Pursuant to the Consumer Financial Protection Act, I have notified the Federal Reserve that CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not “reasonably necessary” to carry out its duties,” Vought wrote.
“The Bureau’s current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment.”
“This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off.”
Politico notes that Vought’s action poses a threat to the CFPB’s survival as the agency could die a slow death even if Congress does not abolish it outright.
This news comes just two days after Elon Musk’s DOGE team entered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters on Friday. At least three of DOGE workers are now “senior advisors” in the staff directory at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
CFBP staffers were “mad as h*ll,” and “p*ssed off” according to reports.
As TGP readers may know, CFPB was originally proposed in 2007 by Warren while she was a law professor and its creation was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010.
Warren was then appointed in September 2010 by Barack Obama as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to set up CFPB.
Warren was later dropped from consideration after the Obama regime officials discovered she could not overcome powerful Republican opposition to get confirmed.
Under the Biden regime, the CFPB and the DOJ warned banks that they may be violating federal law if they did not give illegal aliens loans.
“Lenders should not deny people the opportunity to take out a loan to buy a home, build their businesses or otherwise pursue their financial goals because of unlawful bias and without regard to their actual ability to repay,” said DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke in 2023.
“This guidance reminds lenders that denying someone access to credit based solely on their actual or perceived immigrant status may violate federal law.”
It is starting to look a lot like the last financial crisis. Americans are defaulting on their credit cards at a rate that we haven’t seen in more than a decade, and this could have very serious implications for our financial institutions as we move into 2025. Easy credit has enabled many Americans to enjoy lifestyles that are far beyond what they actually deserve, but outrageously high interest rates, absurd penalties and predatory fees have sucked the financial life out of millions of households. The temptation of easy credit has proven to be too much for many Americans to resist, and now a day of reckoning has arrived and it isn’t going to be fun.
It was expected that credit card defaults would continue to rise this year.
Credit card defaults are at their highest level since 2010 as consumers feel increasingly stretched.
As the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Dec. 29), card lenders wrote off $46 billion in seriously delinquent loans in the first nine months of this year, a 50% jump over 2023. That’s the highest level in 14 years, the report said, citing industry data compiled by BankRegData.
In the last 20 years, there has only been one other year when credit card defaults have reached this level.
This is yet another indication that our economy is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.
Thanks to our seemingly endless cost of living crisis, an increasing number of Americans have been forced to turn to credit card debt just to make ends meet.
At this point, 74.5 percent of all U.S. consumers are carrying at least some credit card debt…
As covered here earlier this month, the share of consumers carrying at least some card debt is pervasive, at 74.5%, per PYMNTS Intelligence research. While that percentage is more or less static across income levels, it leaps to more than 90% for consumers living paycheck to paycheck and having trouble paying their bills.
The research showed that the average outstanding balance among paycheck-to-paycheck cardholders who have issues paying their bills is $7,038, compared to those who live paycheck to paycheck without such difficulties, who had average outstanding balances of $5,766.
This is a nightmare.
Our economy is highly dependent on consumer spending, but now the bottom third of the economic pyramid is “tapped out”…
Mark Zandi, the head of Moody’s Analytics, said, “High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of US consumers are tapped out. Their savings rate right now is zero.”
Credit card debt is one of the most destructive forms of debt that you can accumulate.
In fact, it would be difficult for me to overstate just how devastating credit card debt can be to a family.
If you owe $10,000 on a credit card with a 20 percent interest rate and only make a payment of 300 dollars each month, it will take you more than four years to pay it off.
During that time you will pay $4,718 in interest rate charges in addition to the $10,000 in principal that you are required to pay back.
That does not even account for any penalties or late fees.
Are you starting to get the picture?
The truth is that credit cards are one of the greatest inventions for sucking the wealth out of middle class American families ever invented.
Today, Americans have over a billion credit cards, and they owe over a trillion dollars on those cards.
I just asked Google AI, and I was told that “the combined GDP of the 100 poorest countries is estimated to be around $500 billion”.
So that means that what Americans owe on their credit cards is twice as large as the GDP of the 100 poorest nations on the entire planet combined.
What in the world is wrong with us?
The top 10 credit card issuers in the U.S. control approximately 82 percent of the credit card market.
When we go into credit card debt, we are making them even wealthier.
And that is precisely what they want.
Right now, there are no federal laws that limit the interest rates that credit card companies can charge.
If they want to charge you 30 percent, they can do that.
If they want to charge you 40 percent, they can do that.
And of course they love to hit us with all sorts of fees and penalties as well.
According to Google AI, this is how much revenue some of the largest credit card companies earned in 2022…
American Express: $50.7 billion Bank of America: $92.4 billion Capital One: $34.2 billion Chase: $154.8 billion Citibank: $101 billion Discover: $15.2 billion
That is a ton of money.
The higher we push our credit card balances, the richer they become.
The bottom line is that we need to change our behavior.
We work so hard to earn the money that we make.
Why hand that money over to greedy bankers?
Last week, I discussed the fact that our central banking system has been designed to funnel as much wealth as possible to the very top of the pyramid.
The same thing is true for credit cards.
If you are paying 20 or 30 percent interest on a credit card balance every month, you are literally committing financial suicide.
The bankers are getting rich from your hard work, and you need to get out of credit card debt as soon as you can.
Sadly, for many American families it is already too late. It is almost impossible to pay off debt if you don’t have a job and you are about to lose your home. At this moment, many American families find themselves literally being torn apart by financial stress.
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