{"id":2858,"date":"2008-11-10T18:30:21","date_gmt":"2008-11-11T00:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequence-inc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=2858"},"modified":"2010-06-12T22:20:24","modified_gmt":"2010-06-13T04:20:24","slug":"credit-card-company-bailout-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/credit-card-company-bailout-next\/","title":{"rendered":"Credit card company bailout next?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier today<a href=\"http:\/\/www.walletpop.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/10\/wheres-my-bailout\/\"> I wrote an article on WalletPop.com<\/a> about the ever-growing bailouts being handed out by the federal government. Specifically, I&#8217;m a little ticked off by the AIG bailout, which was at $85 million about a month ago, and now sits at $150 billion. (Yes, that&#8217;s almost double.)<\/p>\n<p>I suggested that the insurance industry and credit card companies would soon be asking for bailouts of their own.<\/p>\n<p>But news late this afternoon may mean that the credit card companies don&#8217;t have to ask for bailouts after all! <strong>All they have to do is pretend to be banks! <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB122635928776415457.html\">The Wall Street Journal reports<\/a> that American Express (yes, the credit card company) has gotten approval from the Federal Reserve to become a bank holding company. That means they have immediate access to the $700 billion TARP (bailout) program.<\/p>\n<p>Last week AmEx reported quarterly profits were down, and they were trimming about 10% of their employees (7,000 of them). The company also reported a $1.4 billion charge for credit losses, with larger charges expected in the next two quarters.<\/p>\n<p>Plan on seeing Visa, MasterCard, and Discover asking to be pretend banks too. They&#8217;d be fools not to try it and have a chance at getting their hands on some federal money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier today I wrote an article on WalletPop.com about the ever-growing bailouts being handed out by the federal government. Specifically, I&#8217;m a little ticked off by the AIG bailout, which was at $85 million about a month ago, and now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fraud-news-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-K6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}