Capital One is hiring 175 new employees in Sioux Falls. Those new hires will bring Capital One's local workforce from the 400 employees it acquired from HSBC 18 months ago to over 1,000.
That's funny: I seem to remember someone saying that President Obama was going to make our credit card jobs disappear. Who was that again? Hmmm....
It's legislation aimed at protecting consumers, but Governor Mike Rounds says it could come with a cost. Congress is calling it the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights.
It's a bill that would ban a variety of fees, require card companies to give notice of interest rate increases, and lock in introductory rates. Card companies would also be completely banned from marketing credit cards to college age voters and teenagers. If passed the bill wouldn't go into effect for nine months to a year.
..."The intentions may be good, but I'm afraid what they are going to do is cost South Dakota between three and five thousand jobs," Governor Mike Rounds said [Ben Dunsmoor, "Rounds: Credit Card Bill Costly for South Dakota," KELOLand.com, 2009.05.14].
Ah, yes, the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights. Congress passed this bill with bipartisan majorities (John Thune, Tim Johnson, and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin all fought the bill) and President Obama signed it into law on May 22, 2009. The law took effect on February 22, 2010.
According to the South Dakota Department of Labor, in February 2010, 29,100 South Dakotans were employed in financial activities. In June 2013, the financial sector employed 29,900 South Dakotans. Capitol One should put that number back over 30,000.
Mike Rounds was wrong. President Obama, Congress, and the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights did not make 5,000 or 3,000 or 1,000 South Dakota jobs disappear.
Related: Ask Capitol One "What's in your wallet?" and they'll have to tell you "$200,000 in corporate welfare that you South Dakotans gave us to train our workers." $200,000 is just a fraction of what Capitol One pays Alec Baldwin to make those funny commercials with the barbarians.
What was the growth from year to year prior to the change? Is 900 new jobs over 3 years similar to the 3 years prior? Also, what are the tasks of the job growth since 2010? I think you will find out that growth slowed and the growth we got was not in acquisitions, and more in collections. Low paying jobs grew while higher paying jobs remained stagnant. Unless new clients rebound, the job growth will still remain below normal levels. As collections decline, we will also see a decline in those jobs as well. Luckily, I think things are on the upswing and people are jumping back into credit. Not sure if that is a good thing but it does promote growth in the economy and it spurs more consumer spending. I think you could have included more to give the full picture.
The annual employment in the financial sector in 2008 was 31,000. We're down a thousand since then. How much of that is directly traceable to credit card reform (reform, as in make better, protect consumers from bad practices), and how much of that is due to recession? The smaller recession of 2001 was followed by two years of smaller job losses in South Dakota's financial sector. I also notice from the annual job numbers that job growth in our financial sector surged during both the tech bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of 2006 and 2007. Hmm... is financial sector job growth a predictor of economic downturns?
Speaking of banks, Anybody tried printing their own checks with the printers that use MICR ink? I just ordered four "books" of blank Checks, and bank charged $63. At least they haven't started charging for deposits like Wells Fargo.
Find a new bank. Each have their flaws, but I'll give you a little hint. The gov't doesn't want you using checks at all. They have gotten past that a little bit now that they are all digitized where they are processed. 9/11 changed things when the checks stopped moving with the mail, so did the money. That can no longer happen and they will make sure of that.
I haven't tried that, but one day one of my grandsons wanted me to print out some funky scrapbook paper for him, so I decided to print one with money on, so I laid several bills on my copier, some of them overlapped, some were "kitty-Korner", and when I hit copy, I got a messages saying they couldn't be copied because they were bank notes or something like that. So I thought for awhile and came up with the idea that I had some of those assorted miniature candy bars in my freezer, and I scattered some of them on the copier and and made a couple pages of them. Unfortunately I am the only one in the immediate family that gets funky ideas. I just couldn't figure out why I couldn't copy the money when I had it overlapping and at odd angles.
Cory nailed one of the reasons Herseth-Sandlin and Johnson have to go - they allowed themselves to be peddlers for the banksters and their lies. It's very easy for the banksters to buy small state (low population) US representatives / senators as they don't cost nearly so much as buying one from NY, CA, or MA. The reason that most of the banksters senators and representatives come from rural states isn't rocket science and it isn't because the rural economy is roaring.
Of course the government wants all financial transactions to be electronic - so they can NSA'em. Imagine when the IRS has the unfettered, no-warrant-needed powers of the NSA.