Summary:
The Senate voted Thursday to strike down a rule capping most bank overdraft fees at $5, a measure adopted late last year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that had been expected to save Americans billions of dollars per year.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, was the lone Republican to oppose the resolution, which passed on a nearly party-line vote, 52-48. It will now move to the House, where Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican who leads the Financial Service Committee, introduced a parallel resolution last month.
The rule would have limited the fees banks and credit unions could charge when customers spend more than they have in their accounts, typically $35 per overdraft. The bureau estimated it would save American households $5 billion a year. It was immediately challenged in court by banking trade groups.
Personal opinon:
Call your bank and tell them to turn off overdraft protection now.
It’s really unfortunate. Most banks and credit unions turn on overdraft protection by default. And many of them make it difficult to turn it off (burying it in online app/site menus, requiring people to call in or go into a branch to deactivate it, etc.). They do this because overdraft fees are a massive source of profit for them.
But it’s pretty easy for people to get trapped in a vicious cycle of debt due to these fees. Most people don’t know they can turn these off, and some don’t even realize they are in place to begin with.
Back in the day, Wells Fargo would intentionally run higher charges first in their cycle so that people couldn’t skirt the edges of overdraft. Like, if someone made a $35 purchase, and three $1 purchases over the same two day period, they would immediately run the $35 purchase and then charge three overdraft fees for each of the $1 purchases instead of running the three $1 purchases first (even if they came first) and then charging a single overdraft fee when the $35 purchase hit.
I believe they got a fine for it.
And yet people continue to bank with Wells Fargo.
Was the fine less than 1% of the profits?
I never pass on the opportunity to say fuck Wells Fargo.
Thus, fuck Wells Fargo.
Furthermore, to echo a comment further down, up against the wall with those shitcunts.
Makes me so fucking mad. Government is for the fucking people not the fucking corporations Jesus fucking christ