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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(108,197 posts)
Fri Apr 12, 2019, 02:41 PM Apr 2019

House Dems target $15B in bank overdraft fees as 2020 election looms

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has been fighting for more than a decade to ban bank practices such as the overdraft fees that spurred a Wachovia customer's class action lawsuit in 2008.

Melanie Garcia's complaint in federal court in Miami accused the Charlotte, N.C.-based lender, which was taken over by Wells Fargo later the same year, of re-ordering her checking account transactions so that the largest were processed first, a maneuver that maximized the number that would exceed her available balance and generate overdraft fees of $35 each.

It's a tactic that Maloney and others view as exploitative, but her bills addressing the matter have never garnered enough support to pass. Now, with Democrats back in the control of the House of Representatives after eight years in the minority and the 2020 presidential campaign heating up, Maloney's odds may have improved.

One of the Democrats vying to run against President Trump, Sen. Cory Booker, introduced a bill targeting overdraft fees last year, and House members quizzed CEOs of the nation's largest banks about the charges three separate times during a lengthy Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"We were surprised by how strongly Democrats pushed overdrafts," said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Cowen Washington Research Group, which has tracked federal policy for the past four decades. "Restricting overdrafts is seen as a way to build political support," he added, which means not only that committee votes on such bills are likely, but that congressional interest may "morph into a broader attack on the size of fees."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/house-dems-target-dollar15b-in-bank-overdraft-fees-as-2020-election-looms/ar-BBVRvhw?li=BBnb7Kz

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House Dems target $15B in bank overdraft fees as 2020 election looms (Original Post) Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Apr 2019 OP
That IS an f'd up tactic that needs to be banned, as are fees on the lines of $35 ... it's all done mr_lebowski Apr 2019 #1
 

mr_lebowski

(33,643 posts)
1. That IS an f'd up tactic that needs to be banned, as are fees on the lines of $35 ... it's all done
Fri Apr 12, 2019, 02:49 PM
Apr 2019

by computer, no human has to deal with that crap. It's basically just free money for the bank. And it's garbage when process things in an order meant to f*** you as hard as possible.

At the very least, lowest $ amounts for a given day should be processed first, and an UNPAID overdraft (i.e. they don't let you go negative) from the bank should be much cheaper a fee, like say 10% of the amount over your balance.

If the bank comes out of pocket for you, for whatever reason they decided to do so (like you usually have a lot of money in their bank and have a been a good customer for 10+ years or whatever), the OD fee should be like 20% with $50 max, so if they put out $100 and you're at $0, and they let you go negative $100, the fee is $20. That would be reasonable.

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