28 Mar
2016
FCC, Payday Loans, and More – TenCount 3.28.16
- No debates, no primary elections, Congress is on vacation: It’s a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Some businesses, including financial markets across Europe, will be closed for Easter Monday, when the most vigorous activity in Washington is the Easter Egg Roll at the White House. On Saturday, the Final Four gets underway in Houston.
- Each year 12 million Americans borrow $50 billion through payday loans, coughing up $7 billion in interest and fees for the privilege. On Tuesday the New America Foundation hosts the launch of the Coalition for Safe Loan Alternatives with a panel discussion about regulation of the payday loan industry and emerging community-based alternatives for consumer borrowing.
- Lots of action at the Federal Communications Commission this week. On Tuesday, the agency kicks off its first-ever incentive auction, wherein broadcast television airwaves are put up for purchase and use by wireless phone and broadband companies. No one yet knows which channels will be for sale or how much in bids they will attract, although the Congressional Budget Office anticipates a $10 billion to $40 billion haul.
- At its regular monthly meeting Thursday, the F.C.C. will consider a comprehensive overhaul of Lifeline, converting a program that provides subsidized telephone connectivity for low-income Americans to one that gives the same audience broadband Internet service. The commission also will put out for comment a consumer privacy plan for broadband providers.
- A week after the FBI said that it might not need Apple’s help after all to break into the locked iPhone of one of the San Bernadino terrorists, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on Thursday discusses proposals to address the “going dark” problem, at an event titled “Decoding the Encryption Dilemma: A Conversation on Backdoors, Going Dark and Cybersecurity.”
- Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will deliver what the department terms a major address on the evolution of financial and trade sanctions and lessons for the future, including how to guard against their misuse, on Wednesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
- Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who is doing her utmost to take the mystery out of the Fed’s stewardship of the economy, addresses the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, after which she will respond to questions by economist Alan Blinder and Columbia business School Dean Glenn Hubbard about the Fed’s plans for interest rates the rest of the year.
- Nuclear terrorism will be the subject of the Nuclear Security Summit, sponsored by President Obama and the State Department on Thursday and Friday and which will feature visits from several heads of state, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
- Planes, trains and automobiles: Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx lays out core principles for design of future transportation projects as he addresses the Center for American Progress on Wednesday with a look at “Bridging the Divide: A Transportation Plan for the 21st Century.”
- No surprises are expected in the monthly employment report, to be issued Friday morning – which means any deviation from an expected addition of 200,000 jobs in March and a jobless rate holding at an eight-year low of 4.9 percent will, of course, be a surprise. Financial markets will be watching closely.