Aurelia Butler

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered LendUp Loans to pay a $100,000 penalty, stop issuing new loans and halt collecting on certain outstanding ones after repeated deceptive marketing and other fair-lending violations, the agency said on Tuesday.The Oakland, California-based lender, which offers funding to online consumers who traditionally have been overlooked by banks because they are considered too risky, agreed to the order, the CFPB said. “We are shuttering the lending operations of this fintech for repeatedly lying and illegally cheating its customers,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. LendUp, which had attracted attention from prominent Silicon Valley investors, expects to complete a wind-down of its operations in early 2020, a spokesman told Reuters.Tuesday’s order comes after a September 2021 CFPB lawsuit alleging that LendUp continued to violate a 2016 order stemming from similar charges.LendUp deceived consumers about the benefits of repeat borrowing; violated the CFPB’s 2016 order; and failed to provide timely and accurate adverse-action notices to clients as required by fair lending laws, the agency added.In 2017, PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) Inc invested in LendUp as part of its efforts to gain an edge on rivals in the highly competitive digital payments market.The agency said that Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc’s GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, as well as other California-based venture capital giants, Andreessen Horwitz and Kleiner Perkins, had a stake in LendUp.The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2007-09 global financial crisis to crack down on predatory lenders. Progressives and advocates have long criticized short-term lenders for saddling borrowers with annualized interest rates that often reach several hundred percent. Chopra, tapped by Democratic President Joe Biden to help address inequities in lending, has said his ambitious agenda includes sharpening the agency’s enforcement focus on companies that repeatedly violate consumer finance laws, with a particular focus on fintech and other technology companies. More

The variant has become dominant in the United States with lightning speed, dashing hopes for a more normal holiday season, resurrecting restrictions and stretching the country’s testing infrastructure ahead of holiday travel and gatherings.Walgreens said in an emailed statement on Tuesday that it would limit both online and in-store purchases of test kits to four per customer. The company also said it was working with suppliers to catch up with demand.Walmart (NYSE:WMT) set a limit of eight tests for each online order, but allowed its physical stores to set their own limits depending on inventory levels.”We do have strong inventory levels nationally in store,” Walmart said in a statement. “However, inventory is more limited online depending on the zip code.”CVS limited sales of test kits to six per person and said the products might be temporarily out of stock on its website as it priorities inventories at its stores.The Biden administration said earlier in the day it would buy 500 million at-home rapid tests that Americans can order online for free starting in January. More

The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and GramercyHaving tried to defy internal and external economic logic by repeatedly cutting interest rates, Turkey opted this week for a new set of unorthodox measures to stabilise its currency.Whether the authorities are more successful ultimately this time around boils down to a simple question: will Turkish households and companies view this “circuit breaker” as a bridge to a more comprehensive set of measures that address the underlying drivers of economic and financial instability or, instead, as a destination that soon proves inherently unstable?It is hard to put into words how disorderly the Turkish currency markets had become by Monday afternoon. The lira had weakened to beyond TL18 per US dollar, constituting a halving of its value in just two months.The rate of depreciation was gathering momentum, as was the chaotic nature of the trading even though the central bank was intervening, thereby depleting further its international reserves.It was just a matter of time until all this also led to another leg-up in an inflation rate already above 20 per cent. A growing part of the population were opting to protect their savings by changing lira deposits into dollars and other hard currency (what economists refer to as “dollarisation”).The proximate cause of all this was the 5 percentage points cut in domestic policy rates since September at a time when both internal and external conditions called for a hike. Inflation was rising, the currency was under pressure and global monetary policy conditions were starting to tighten, especially in the emerging world.Desperate for a circuit breaker, the authorities opted this week for a set of complex measures that are best described as an interest rate equalisation mechanism with guarantees to maintain the real value of lira deposits when measured in hard currency.In addition to lowering the incentive for further dollarisation, this approach appears to have three side-benefits of interest to the Turkish authorities. First, it avoids the impact of a partial and implicit interest rate hike on the rest of the economy. Second, because the guarantee applies to 3-12-month deposits, it encourages the lengthening of the average duration of such deposits. And third, it helps alleviate heavy and mounting inflationary pressures.

All this at a time when, prior to the announcement, the currency was trading in “overshoot” territory according to most economic measures.These advantages come with considerable risks. The mechanism exposes the fiscal accounts/central bank to a large financing burden unless other measures are taken to control inflation and limit renewed pressures on the currency away from dollarisation. If the mechanism fails, it will further undermine the credibility of policymakers, making it harder for the next set of measures to take hold quickly even if they are comprehensive and appropriate.It is the still-large set of Turkish lira depositors who, within weeks, will determine the outcome. If they trust the policy response and worry little about the potential collateral damage, they will encourage others to buy the domestic currency, domestic and external. The government can help this process by credibly signalling that the latest measures are not an end in themselves but rather a bridge to a more comprehensive set of policies.This would include explicit rate hikes by the central bank which, at this point, are still necessary but no longer sufficient. Turkey will also need to seek other internal anchors, such as a tightening of fiscal policy, and perhaps also external ones, such as agreement on an IMF programme that provides both funding and external validations.All this will need to be done while avoiding the understandable temptation of capital controls that would undermine a historically powerful, and still impactful open growth model that, both economically and financially, exploits Turkey’s many “competitive edges”.Through a new set of unorthodox measures, Turkey has bought itself artificial stability. This is unlikely to translate into genuine stability unless Turkish citizens are convinced that their currency crisis has truly passed.This only happens if the government quickly shifts to a more comprehensive — and, yes, more orthodox — policy approach. Failing to do this would further erode the country’s strong economic attributes. After all, there are limits to continuously defying the laws of both economics and finance. More

In most years the world gets better. It seldom feels that way, admittedly, but that is human nature: we worry about the catastrophe in the news — the earthquake, war, famine or pandemic — and miss the gradual but relentless growth of production, technology and understanding. During recent decades, as charted by social scientists such as Hans Rosling, Max Roser and Steven Pinker, those forces have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. By stopping to do a careful accounting, you can see the process in action, year by year.When I last did this exercise in 2019, it was easy to conclude life had improved. But some years are different. The chaos wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has been the greatest challenge to humanity’s grip on its own condition since the height of the nuclear stand-off during the cold war. It is interesting then to ask: did the world get better during 2020 and 2021? Or did the pandemic mark an actual setback to human progress? My answers are: probably and no.Perhaps the best place to start is with the pandemic itself. Although the statistics are mere estimates, it has directly caused about 275m infections and 5m deaths, as well as having a drastic secondary impact on living standards, with lockdowns and travel restrictions keeping us from our families.The emergence of Omicron makes it particularly tempting to feel miserable right now, but in the long perspective, Covid-19 could be far worse. First, after decades with no great pandemic, what emerged could have been more infectious and more lethal — plenty of diseases in the past, including Sars in 2003, killed more than 10 per cent of those infected. What we have is survivable for most. Second, the development of vaccines was a spectacular success. Doctors pioneered the new technology of mRNA and administered almost 9bn doses in just 21 months since the outbreak began. Covid-19 is horrible, yes, but it is no cataclysm.Third, it is important to note that our very prosperity is what makes the virus so disruptive. Advanced countries are willing and able to pay a high price to save a small number of lives. Fifty or 100 years ago, life would have gone on as normal while the disease ripped through a much younger population. Whether lockdowns were good or bad, we could afford to make the choice.The damage done to the global economy is smaller than the scale of the Covid-19 event might suggest. In fact, remarkably so. In most rich countries, output in 2021 was still less than in 2019, but overall the world economy grew by 2.6 per cent during the pandemic. It is testament to how well the capitalist system works that even during the most extreme health emergency in a century, it still delivered enough growth to lift people out of poverty.There are countries, especially in tourism-dependent or island economies such as Thailand or in the Caribbean, where living standards have slipped, and some very poor countries, such as Afghanistan and Myanmar, have suffered fresh political crises that threaten to set them back many years. But they are offset by other emerging economies, such as Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya, which lost some growth, but are still richer now than they were a couple of years ago.Humanity has survived the pandemic thus far with its material prosperity intact or even improved. Against that, however, many threats to our future security and prosperity have got worse.Carbon dioxide concentrations at the Mauna Loa observatory went up relentlessly, from a peak of 414 parts per million in 2019, to almost 420 ppm in 2021. Although carbon emissions did fall during the pandemic, they quickly bounced back. The observatory said it saw no discernible signal from the pandemic when measuring the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere.The COP26 summit in Glasgow was as disappointing as ever. What encouragement there was on the climate came from private enterprise: 2020 and 2021 were the years when electric vehicles began to go mainstream. They provide another technological building block for an emission-free future. Many more are still needed, but that progress inspires hope.Geopolitics, by contrast, does not. One defining ingredient of global growth since 1989 is peace and security. In Taiwan and in Ukraine, that no longer seems guaranteed, calling into question the whole global trading system on which prosperity relies. There are disturbing signs of a new nuclear arms race between the US, Russia and China — nuclear weapons are still a leading contender for how humanity will eventually destroy itself.Worst of all, it was a period of retreat for democracy. According to Freedom House, 2020 was the worst in a 15-year run of decline for democratic governance. The pandemic has been a boon for authoritarians and a difficult challenge for liberal democracies. In the long-run, freedom and prosperity are intertwined.Overall, then, humanity grew somewhat more prosperous, but the foundations of that prosperity in peace, environmental stability and liberal democracy deteriorated. Call it roughly even. It is the worst assessment one would give in decades. Since it was achieved in the face of a pandemic, however, perhaps there is still reason this Christmas for some good [email protected] More

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain announced on Tuesday 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) of extra support for businesses hit hardest by the wave of Omicron variant coronavirus cases, which is hammering the country’s hospitality sector and other businesses.Finance minister Rishi Sunak said he was confident the measures would help hundreds of thousands of businesses. But he added that he would “respond proportionately and appropriately” if the government were to impose further restrictions to slow Omicron, which would further hit the economy.Under the support announced on Tuesday, hospitality and leisure firms in England will be eligible for grants of up to 6,000 pounds for each of their premises, accounting for almost 700 million pounds of the new package.The grants were equivalent to those provided to hospitality businesses when they were fully closed earlier this year, the finance ministry said.A fund to support cultural organisations would be increased by 30 million pounds, while 100 million pounds would be provided to English local authorities for business support measures and 150 million pounds to governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.The ministry also said it would cover the cost of statutory sick pay for COVID-related absences, for up to two weeks per employee, for small and medium-sized employers across the United Kingdom. Britain borrowed more than 300 billion pounds in the last financial year to help it offset the hit to the economy from coronavirus and the government’s lockdowns. “Of course I will always respond proportionately and appropriately to the situation that we face, people can have confidence in that,” Sunak said when asked by a reporter if there would be more help for businesses in the event of further restrictions.Asked about the likelihood of more restrictions, Sunak said the situation was too uncertain to know the path ahead.”What the prime minister said is that we’re reviewing the data day by day, hour by hour, keeping the situation under constant review but can’t rule anything out,” he said.Johnson said on Monday he was looking at all kinds of measures to keep Omicron under control, cautioning that further restrictions might be needed.Figures from trade body UKHospitality published on Monday showed a 40% fall in takings over the weekend and deep gloom about the prospects for New Year’s Eve.”This is a generous package building on existing hospitality support measures to provide an immediate emergency cash injection for those businesses who, through no fault of their own, have seen their most valuable trading period annihilated,” UKHospitality Chief Executive Kate Nicholls said.($1 = 0.7548 pounds) More