MaxedOut

Went to see MaxedOut tonight in a special showing at Harvard Law. Highly recommended – catch it if you can. It’s also very timely now that (subprime) debt is “suddenly” a big issue because a couple of big lenders are in financial trouble. As the film shows, credit card companies and major banks are doing some very nasty stuff and have no intention of changing their ways – they make way too much money doing what they do.

We obviously need some major policy change, but that will no doubt take a lot of time. As a more concrete step, it would be nice to change banks to a less evil, more progressive one. There are some out there – smaller ones like Wainwright in Boston, for instance. But high-quality, extensive online banking is really, really important to me, and from what I hear their online banking isn’t quite on par with the offerings from bigger banks quite yet. I’ll keep an eye on them though.