American consumers will soon have an easier time: they will shop at either Amazon or Wal-Mart. That’s overstating the situation, but after Amazon announced that it was buying Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and Wal-Mart (which last year bought fledging Amazon competitor Jet.com for $3.3 billion), said it had purchased online men’s retailer Bonobos for $310 million, the retail landscape shifted once again. Both transactions signify that to succeed, companies will need robust digital as well as a brick and mortar beachheads. Whenever big deals are announced, it can make you feel like there are going to be three or four companies left in each sector. In the past, there have always been cycles of expansion and consolidation and just as big conglomerates were created, they could also be pared down.
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It’s wedding season and as thousands of happy couples prepare to take vows, just a fraction will spend time contemplating the end of their relationships. Let’s face it: signing a pre-nuptial agreement (“prenup”) is the most unromantic engagement or wedding gift ever. A prenup is a contract that outlines how a couple would split their financial lives in the event that the relationship does not work out. While most of us may think of a pre-nup as something for the very rich, after hearing about disastrous divorces and the financial horror stories associated with them, it’s clear that many more couples might benefit from the process that forces them to outline what they bring into the marriage, how they might split up assets accumulated during the marriage (marital property), including a home, and how the couple intends to manage family gifts or an inheritance.
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Last week, House lawmakers passed a bill that threw consumers under the bus. The Financial Choice Act would gut the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 by giving the president the power to fire the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at any time for any -- or no -- reason. It would also provide Congress with sweeping power over the CFPB's budget, which means that lawmakers could defund the agency entirely. That’s a shame, because in the six years since the CFPB was established, it has provided nearly $12 billion in relief for more than 29 million consumers. The CFPB was created out of Dodd Frank in order to create a single point of accountability for enforcing federal consumer financial laws and protecting consumers in the financial marketplace. The agency’s main goals are to:
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