why god hates me

Payment Reporting Builds Credit (PRBC) is an alternative credit reporting agency that will record your payment histories for things like rent and utilities bills. PRBC says you can then use this verified credit history to supplement your FICO score and credit history from the big three reporting companies. It’s meant in part as a way to help people who don’t have extensive standard credit histories, or who have always paid monthly expenses on time but have other blots (like medical bills) on their official credit histories.

One good thing about PRBC is that your credit file is yours to view and share, and it doesn’t cost you anything to access it.

The bad news: it’s not free. If you use one of their online bill pay partners—Account Now, Billeo, or CheckFree—verification of your payment history won’t cost you; however, all three services charge around $5 month to use. If you opt to pay your bills some other way or want to confirm past payments, the PRBC charges you $20 to verify up to 36 months of rent, and $15 for other types of accounts such as phone or cable.

Ultimately, we’re not convinced a PRBC alternate credit history will help you secure a loan or a lower interest rate, and it may all be moot anyway for the next few years as lending grows increasingly scarce. It might help you with something like an apartment lease, though. If you’re a young person with no real credit history, or someone who got financially slammed from a medical disaster, it may give you a way to prove you’re not a deadbeat.

Payment Reporting Builds Credit
“Finally, Credit For Paying the Bills” [Washington Post]
(Photo: Getty)

Tonight’s premiere of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” is about cannibalism and hunting men for sport. The unfortunately-placed McDonald’s commercial halfway through the show featured a guy swinging a bat at his friend because he smells food, and then everyone else at the party swarming over the fallen friend to feast. Awkward!

This Saturday (September 20th) is the Better Business Bureau’s “Secure Your ID” day: in select cities, “bring up to three boxes or bags of paper documents that contain your personal information and we’ll shred them.” Or, you know, just do it yourself all year long. [BBB]

MisterJalopy over at BoingBoing has put together a rough outline of a cheat sheet when shopping for eggs, based on an article in yesterday’s New York Times on how to interpret egg carton labeling. [BoingBoing]

Markets rallied in late trading in the biggest gain in six years, emboldened by news that Washington wants to create a new agency that will buy up ALL the bad loans on these financial companies’ books. The initiative would be an attempt to fashion a holistic solution instead of bailing out each individual bank as it fails. This would cost many more billions of dollars and require Congressional approval. In order for all those CongressCritters to keep their jobs, there is talk that the deal would be packaged with another stimulus package perhaps including more rebates, along with food stamps and unemployment benefits.

Stocks Post Huge Late-Day Surge [CBS]

Forbes magazine has put together a list of America’s most stressful cities and as a product of Chicago, the winner of the dubious distinction of being America’s most stressful city, I have this to say: “Yeah, so? Shut up and let me eat my hot dog in peace for once, goddamn it. No, I’m not yelling. Why are you always saying that I’m yelling? It’s not like you never yell! Pass the sport peppers before this gets ugly.”

Without further ado…

America’s Most Stressful Cities:

10. Philadelphia, PA

9. Providence, R.I.

8. Salt Lake City, Utah

7. Cleveland, Ohio

6. San Diego, Calif.

5. San Francisco, Calif.

4. Los Angeles, Calif.

3. Detroit, Mich.

2. New York, N.Y.

1. Chicago, Ill.

The magazine considered unemployment rate, expensive gas, high population density and relatively poor air quality as its criteria for what made one city more stressful than another.

Chicago has a 7.3% unemployment rate, the eighth most polluted air in our ranking and in city where everybody drives to get around, a gallon of gas costs a nickel under $4 dollars.

Omitted from the calculations:

America’s Most Stressful Cities [Forbes]
(Photos: Meghann Marco & Meghann Marco)

FrankenChicken moved closer to your dinner table after the FDA announced they’re going to begin developing the procedures and guidelines that will allow farmers to genetically engineer animals to have more desirable traits and then sell them to you in the supermarket. For instance, featherless chicken or faster-growing fish. They will not require food to be labeled as genetically modified as long as there’s no change in the final product, a move Consumers Union called “incomprehensible.”

For dinner: Genetically altered ’super chicken’ [AP]

Looking to spruce up the ol’ nest? Home Depot announced a big sale today, with temporary pricecuts of 5-50%, with 400 items being announced each Thursday for the next three weeks.

Home Depot slashes prices, seeking to gain share [MarketPlace] (Thanks to Anne!) (Photo: Maulleigh)

Here’s a mystery story to distract you from the U.S. Banking Apocalypse. UltimateBet.com, “one of the top 10 poker sites,” has admitted that employees manipulated the software to cheat from at least January 2005 to January 2008, when some players started noticing an unusually high rate of wins for a certain user name. An Australian player mapped that user’s wins against accounts that had played a similar number of hands, and realized that “NioNio’s” wins were “less likely than ‘winning a one-in-a-million lottery on four consecutive days.’” But NioNio is just one part of the mystery.

As the players continued to dig, they concluded that NioNio was at the center of a web of accounts that were able to change user names with ease, making it harder for victims to detect the cheating.

UltimateBets launched an investigation when the players brought this to their attention, and in March of this year they issued a confirmation that certain players had been cheating by taking advantage of malicious code that had been inserted by prior employees.

As of September, no one has been named in the scandal, although some players have named a poker pro. Two other poker pros visited him in person, with a lawyer present, and now say they’re no longer sure he was the culprit—or at least not the main culprit.

Another problem is that the company that claims ownership of UltimateBet—”Tokwiro Enterprises, headquartered in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory in southern Canada”—may be a front for Blast-Off Ltd., which has filed an $85 million claim against UltimateBet. The Kahnawake Gaming Commission has ordered an investigation of UltimateBet, but that’s not comforting some victims:

[Tokwiro] has issued some refunds and promised to repay any players who lost money once an outside investigation is completed. But many players who haven’t received credits remain fearful they will never see a dime.

“Poker site cheating plot a high-stakes whodunit” [MSNBC] (Thanks to Patrick!)

It’s one thing to understand what just happened to the financial markets, and yet another to actually be able to explain what just happened. Thankfully, Steven Levitt from Freakonomics walked down the hall and found two economists from the University of Chicago (Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap,) who gave him the best explanation I’ve been able to find about what the hell just happened.

From A.I.G. and credit default swaps to why Bear Stearns got a bailout but Lehman Brothers did not, this Q&A sheds some much appreciated light on the most nagging puzzles presented to us in the past week.

Here’s a taste:

The Fannie and Freddie situation was a result of their unique roles in the economy. They had been set up to support the housing market. They helped guarantee mortgages (provided they met certain standards), and were able to fund these guarantees by issuing their own debt, which was in turn tacitly backed by the government. The government guarantees allowed Fannie and Freddie to take on far more debt than a normal company. In principle, they were also supposed to use the government guarantee to reduce the mortgage cost to the homeowners, but the Fed and others have argued that this hardly occurred. Instead, they appear to have used the funding advantage to rack up huge profits and squeeze the private sector out of the “conforming” mortgage market. Regardless, many firms and foreign governments considered the debt of Fannie and Freddie as a substitute for U.S. Treasury securities and snapped it up eagerly.

Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages. The massive amount of diffusely held debt would have caused collapses everywhere if it was defaulted upon; so the Treasury announced that it would explicitly guarantee the debt.

But once the debt was guaranteed to be secure (and the government would wipe out shareholders if it carried through with the guarantee), no self-interested investor was willing to supply more equity to help buffer the losses. Hence, the Treasury ended up taking them over.

Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals [Freakonomics]
(Photo: shadowmancer76 )