Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Kathy Kraninger resigned Wednesday at the request of the newly sworn-in President Biden, clearing the way for his nominee to lead the powerful regulatory agency.

Kraninger, a Republican appointed by former President Trump, announced her departure via Twitter roughly an hour after Biden was inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president. 

“I support the Constitutional prerogative of the President to appoint senior officials within the government who support the President’s policy priorities, which ensures our government is responsive to the will of the people as expressed in presidential elections,” Kraninger wrote.

Over the coming months, the U.S. Census Bureau will roll out the results of the 2020 census, its once-a-decade headcount that will give us precise details on the size, growth, age, and racial-ethnic makeup of the nation’s population. In the lead-up to that over the past year, the Bureau has released the results of other large surveys and studies, which I have analyzed to pinpoint key demographic trends that the decennial census is likely to confirm.

These trends include an unprecedented stagnation in population growth, a continued decrease in Americans’ geographical mobility, more pronounced population aging, a first-time decline in the size of the white population, and rising racial and ethnic diversity among millennials, Gen Z, and younger groups, which now comprise a majority of the nation’s residents. Below, I recap those trends and conclude by examining alternative Census Bureau projections that reinforce the crucial role immigration will play in future population growth.

During the pandemic, we’re doing more online – working, connecting with family and friends, shopping, and banking. So, if something goes wrong with your device, you want to fix it right away. Scammers are preying on this, offering phony tech support services. Here’s what you should know about tech support scams.

How to spot tech support scams

Scammers take advantage of your reasonable concerns about viruses and other threats, but their real goal isn’t to protect your computer. Instead, they want to sell you useless services, steal your credit card number, or install malware, which lets them see everything on your computer.

How do you know if you’re being scammed? Here are three common scenarios:

In a shift from recent years that have seen tech jobs as one of the most prominent fields for opportunity, the past year showed the rise of human-centric roles to cater to new and urgent needs brought on by the pandemic. LinkedIn’s latest Jobs on the Rise report, a special edition of the career site’s yearly emerging jobs report, saw spikes in hiring for frontline e-commerce workers, health-care professionals, workplace diversity experts and more as the top jobs on the rise that are expected to continue well into 2021.

For its report, LinkedIn tracked the growth in listings for over 15,000 job titles to find the ones that increased the most in 2020 compared with the year prior; those titles were then grouped into 15 major career trends that emerged from a year, and corresponding job market, unlike any other.

The bottom 60 percent of earners in America will see a "significant impact" if $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks are issued, according to a recent report.

A $2,000 payment would give a 60 percent majority of Americans, those with annual incomes under $65,000, an average income boost of 11 percent, according to a report released last week by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The bottom 20 percent, those with incomes below $21,300 per year, would see a substantial average income increase of 29 percent.

The report says that the $600 checks that recently went out to a majority of Americans amounted to an increase of around 3 percent for the bottom 60 percent and 8 percent for the bottom 20 percent. The $2,000 checks will become reality if the Caring for Americans with Supplemental Help (CASH) Act is signed into law. The bill passed in the House late last month in response following backlash over what may viewed as the inadequacy of $600 payments. It has not been voted on in the Senate.

Americans are in a precarious position when it comes to emergency savings.

If you had to come up with $2,000 to cover an unexpected expense, would you be able to do it? If your answer is no, you're definitely not alone. Millions of your fellow Americans would be hard-pressed to find the funds, too.

In fact, according to the Federal Reserve, the number of people who would be able to access $2,000 for surprise bills declined dramatically this year. This is worrying as almost a third of Americans may need to do so.

On 30 December 2020, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered an order invalidating two provisions of the “Prepaid Account Rule” (the Rule) promulgated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Specifically, the order invalidated the Rule’s mandatory short form disclosure requirement and the requirement for a thirty-day delay before linking prepaid products to credit, on the basis that the CFPB had exceeded its statutory authority.

The Rule[2] imposes consumer protection requirements with respect to open loop, general purpose prepaid cards as well as other products that are “capable of holding funds, rather than merely acting as a pass-through vehicle,” such as digital wallets.

Insider threats are redefined in 2021, the work-from-home trend will continue define the threat landscape and mobile endpoints become the attack vector of choice, according 2021 forecasts.

After shrinking in 2020, cybersecurity budgets in 2021 climb higher than pre-pandemic limits. Authentication, cloud data protection and application monitoring will top the list of CISO budget and cybersecurity priorities. According to experts, these are just a few of the themes to dominate the year ahead.

Here is round-robin of expert opinions illuminating the year ahead.

Home is Where the Attacks Will Happen in 2021

To date, Amscot has contributed over $10.1 million to Florida not-for-profits. Each of these organizations plays a vital role in the health and growth of our communities, and we are honored to support them.

Nebraska voters have moved closer toward getting the chance to decide whether or not to put limits on the amount of interest payday loans can charge, thanks to a local campaign that collected 120,000 signatures.

The Nebraskans for Responsible Lending coalition, which includes state chapters of the AARP and ACLU among its members, announced Thursday they had collected enough signed petitions to get an initiative that would cap the annual interest rate on payday loans at 36% onto the November ballot during the 2020 general election.

Currently, the average interest rate for a payday loan in Nebraska is 404%, according to the coalition. Lenders who offer these small loans, which you can generally take out by walking into a lender with just a valid ID, proof of income and a bank account, require borrowers to pay a "finance charge" (service fees and interest) to get the loan, the balance of which is due two weeks later, typically on your next payday.