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Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

latimes.com

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Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#131

Post by rando18423 »

ben_jones wrote: post #69
pmorici wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, the handful of irregularities they found at LC doesn't begin to amount to the shady stuff large banks have been caught doing. More importantly if you are a regular investor in LC loans none of the things found have caused investors in LC notes to lose money.

Agreed as much as I love ragging on unicorns LC did not complicity launder money for Mexican drug cartels [1]. [1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avinash-tharoor/banks-cartel-m...

Why not just group the fraudsters and the gangsters together like we normally do? These banks have had about 15x as much time to make that mistake, to me it looks like LC was headed that route.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#132

Post by pbarnes_1 »

cstejerean wrote: post #76
pbarnes_1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success of Uber in a city is directly proportional to how much taxis suck in that city. So Singapore is one of a few cities where that's the case (NYC also -- Uber doesn't really work there. I was there for 8 days and requesting an Uber as a 10-15 minute wait. You can get into one of a million cabs that go by in that time. I gave up).

Except when it's 4 pm and you want to go to the airport from Manhattan, at which point none of the million cabs are interested in picking you up.

I found that using Blacklane in that case was cheaper and more predictable than Uber.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#133

Post by rhizome »

dragonwriter wrote: post #59
philovivero wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's been around for years. If corporations are persons, and they can commit felonies, why not give them punishments that are analogous to what you'd give a person who committed a felony?

> If corporations are persons, and they can commit felonies, why not give them punishments that are analogous to what you'd give a person who committed a felony? Because corporate personhood is a legal fiction, and a corporate death penalty doesn't really hurt the people who a corporation stands in for very much, and hurts lots of other people a lot.

a corporate death penalty doesn't really hurt the people who a corporation stands in for very much

I know, that's why I included prison.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#134

Post by rhizome »

josho wrote: post #14
rhizome wrote: post #3

In just world this would result in a prison sentence, banishment from stock exchanges, and revocation of their corporate charter. The fact that there is no capital punishment for companies, especially public ones, provides a moral hazard.

I agree. Our society tolerates white collar crime far more than we should. We've got a good handle on things like punishing criminals that rob someone at gunpoint. However, we struggle with seeing the CEO making short term loan to his company as theft from investors (the short term loan hid the fact that the company wasn't meeting its presumably publicly announced growth targets). The issue is that white collar crime…

I view white-collar crime as primarily an individual act. Corporate crime, such as we saw with HSBC, Dow Chemical, and even Mitchell Jessen, escapes significant punishment, only very rarely rising to criminal conduct. That the conduct is legal, or considered legal, is a policy and legislative outcome.

As for intent, the law has centuries of precedent to incorporate into criminal statutes that affect corporate activities. It's just that the standards are artificially high and don't take into account the diffuse nature of the enterprise. But we have several decades of even that which could be applied, but isn't.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#135

Post by rhizome »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
rhizome wrote: post #3

In just world this would result in a prison sentence, banishment from stock exchanges, and revocation of their corporate charter. The fact that there is no capital punishment for companies, especially public ones, provides a moral hazard.

> capital punishment for companies That's the second time today I see this, is this some kind of meme?

I wasn't aware of its prevalence, but hey. Great minds yadda yadda.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#136

Post by awad »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #35
jsemrau wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me still this equation holds true. Taxes are abundant and cheap in Singapore. Riding in someone's car makes me uncomfortable. (But that is just me, I suppose)

The success of Uber in a city is directly proportional to how much taxis suck in that city. So Singapore is one of a few cities where that's the case (NYC also -- Uber doesn't really work there. I was there for 8 days and requesting an Uber as a 10-15 minute wait. You can get into one of a million cabs that go by in that time. I gave up).

NYC is actually one of Uber's most important cities. Don't forget that NYC is more than just Manhattan below 125th street. Getting a taxi in the outer boroughs was miserable. The green ones help but were a little too late. The black car services are entirely unpredictable and unreliable, doubly so if you are not of the ethnicity of the dispatcher/drivers they employ.

And let's not even talk about the number of times a cab driver straight up refused to take me to Brooklyn, both during the day and late at night. Totally illegal, but it happens all the time.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#137

Post by ycombobreaker »

traviscj wrote: post #125
ycombobreaker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually take credit card instead of pretending their credit card reader is broken After you've arrived at your destination, have you really found any taxi driver who would rather take _no payment_ than a credit card? If all you have is plastic--and if the driver is required to accept that form of payment--then I guess I don't see the problem (for riders). I've had drivers take my credit card # on a carbon copy phy…

So, when it is unclear whether they are scamming you, your response is: here, have a physical copy of my credit card information? Sure, the liability is with your bank, but still seems like bad decision making.

I don't see the problem:

- You are using "scamming" as a binary yes/no behavior, when in fact there is a huge difference between lying about a faulty machine and committing credit card fraud. The most likely reason for the lie (not "scam", that's too strong of a word here) is to avoid the credit processing fee. And that's _if_ they are lying in the first place. There simply isn't much (risk-adjusted) benefit for the driver to escalate that situation into credit fraud.

- The information on a hard-copy swipe is identical to a magnetic swipe and also the information provided to any online merchant (i.e. CC#, name, expiration; not CVV). Why should I be any more worried about this information on a piece of paper vs. the risk of a card skimmer at a gas station? Or a security breach of any one of the multitude of online retails who I have _ever_ shopped with?

- As you stated, the risk goes to the bank, as I am not liable for fraudulent transactions on my card. In fact, there's actually risk going to the driver as well: without an immediate approval, they don't know if I'm handing them a worthless card!

- The implication from your statement seems to be that... you wouldn't pay the driver, who has already rendered services and is capable of accepting valid payment from you. Is that what you mean? If so, that is not OK.

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