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While I was out yesterday, there was big news on debit card fees.  Here’s how the LA Times headlined it:

Fed Reserve bans most bank overdraft fees

This caused some editorial gnashing of teeth at MoJo world headquarters, since a big chunk of my upcoming piece on the finance lobby is built around the failure of authorities to do anything about overdraft fees.  In the end though, it turned out we didn’t have to do very much aside from changing “the Fed has never done anything” to — well, I don’t want to give anything away just yet.  Let’s just say the change wasn’t a big one.

You see, the Fed didn’t ban most overdraft fees, regardless of what the Times copy desk might think.  All they did was tell banks that they have to give customers the option of whether they want overdraft protection in the first place.  If they don’t, they’ll be allowed to opt out and purchases that run your account down past zero will simply be rejected.

This is, without question, a good thing.  The fact that banks not only made billions of dollars by charging outrageous overdraft fees, but insisted that customers had to accept overdraft protection even if they didn’t want it (a policy put in place a few years ago as a deliberate way to make more money from their most vulnerable customers), made it almost a poster child for abusive practices.  So three cheers that it’s gone.

But look: most people want overdraft protection.  Banks are right about that.  Unlike checkbooks of old, debit cards are marketed as routine payment devices, and since debit cards don’t have built-in check registers that warn you when your account is getting low, it’s all too easy to inadvertantly run up big overdraft charges.  But the new Fed regulations do nothing about that.  Under industry pressure, they ruled in 2004 that overdraft fees weren’t loans, and they still aren’t.  So a $35 fee on a $17 overdraft that’s paid off in five days —and yes, this is the industry average — amounts to an APR of over 10,000%.  Except it’s not an APR because it’s not a loan.  It’s a “fee.”

Hogwash.  It’s a small, short-term loan, just like a credit card charge.  The APR should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-30%, like a credit card, with perhaps a small processing fee added to that.  And since we live in an electronic era, that processing fee is small: maybe 50 cents or so.  A dollar max.

But the Fed did nothing about that.  Or about the number of fees banks can charge per day.  Or about re-ordering of fees to run up total charges.  Overdraft protection really is a convenience in a world where banks are doing everything they can to encourage their use even for tiny transactions, and consumers shouldn’t be required to accept usurious loan rates and sleazy hidden hustles in order to get it.  Wake me up when the Fed gets around to that.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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