Bankruptcy and mortgage studies, plus wildfires

I thought I'd try something new I hope you find useful: Today's reading list. It's headlines and other reports on credit, debt and payments systems that I found newsworthy, interesting or odd enough to be worth passing along.

For me, the highlight of the Teen Choice Awards wasn't Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber or the Harry Potter tribute.

It was Ashton Kutcher giving financial advice.

Seriously.

Gesturing forcefully, and almost Howard Beale-like in his zeal, Rep. Hansen Clarke used his five-minute speech to call on all Americans to cut up their credit cards -- and then whipped out a pair of blue-handled scissors to demonstrate. Roll the tape, C-SPAN!

Run for the Borders!

I told you back in January and now I really mean it: If you have a Borders gift card you've been meaning to redeem, do it now. Now. Let the dog walk himself. Skip the weekly lunch bunch. Tell your boss you have to leave early because you have to meet the sprinkler guy. Whatever. But go as soon as you can, either directly to the store, or online, and cash out that card.

After failing to sell itself off, the company is liquidating, with stores beginning to close as soon as Friday.

Facing 25 online personal finance journalists, President Obama got personal, giving a glimpse into his own financial history -- including the money advice his grandmother gave him and why the $125,000 in student loans he and his wife Michelle racked up was a good investment.

The president was an unscheduled drop-in guest at the Personal Finance Online Summit, an event held Wednesday at the White House. During it, high-level administration economic officials gave an afternoon of on- and off-the-record briefings to an assorted group of online personal finance editors, myself included. The idea for the summit came because, presidential message adviser Stephanie Cutter said, "Americans are looking to take charge of their personal finance issues ... and they're looking to online sources to get it done."

No major news was broken, which is why I'm writing a blog item rather than a news story, but the event had some fascinating moments, leading off with the president's salute to his grandmother's common-sense money advice -- and why in one case it was smart to ignore it.

Thanks to Miss Thrifty for hosting the 311th Carnival of Personal Finance, a weekly, traveling compendium of the best personal finance items from around the blogosphere. In the carnival, Miss T. links to my item from last week on the interesting no-interest deal obtained by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich from Tiffany's.

I'm happy to see that My Personal Finance Journey -- host of the 310th edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance -- likes Smurfs. Or, perhaps more accurately, my blog post from last week titled "A new player in the Smurf game: a parental wallet."

I rise, not to throw glitter on him, or to excoriate him for ill-chosen words, but to defend Newt.

Newt Gingrich's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has gotten off to an ill-footed start, with the aforementioned glitter-dump by a gay activist and a chewing out by an Iowa conservative over unflattering comments about fellow Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan.

Then, this past Sunday, Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation" program, grilled Gingrich over disclosures he had owed a "revolving charge" account with Tiffany and Co. somewhere between $250,001 and $500,000.

A Washington Post factchecker gave him the unflattering "three Pinocchios" for his explaination of how he paid for it. But what he said was entirely plausible.

For a long time, I've been a fan of the cartoons in "The New Yorker" magazine.

One caught my eye back in 2000, when I was new to writing and editing personal finance stories.

In the cartoon, Dad's sitting on the couch with his son, as Mom stands in the background, fear in her eyes. A computer is in the other room. "It's very important that you try very, very hard," Dad says to his son, "to remember where you electronically transferred Mommy and Daddy's assets."

Eleven years of electronic progress later, many of us are carrying around smartphones and tablet devices. With them come new and even easier ways for our children to drain our bank accounts -- accidentally, through games aimed at children who lack a firm grasp on the difference between real and imaginary money.

News organizations that have sniffed around hacker chatrooms say that some of their denizens are offering 2.2 million credit card numbers they say they hacked from Sony PlayStation's database of online users.

Sony, meanwhile, is trying to reassure its customers, saying there's still no evidence that the card numbers were hacked, and besides, they were stored in an encrypted fashion.

When you signed up to play KillStation or another game online on your PlayStation, I bet you didn't think there would be any real life danger.

Now you know differently.

Sony, which runs the PlayStation network, announced Tuesday that between April 17 and April 19, data from its 77 million account holders was "compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network."

Here's what consumers should know about the situation -- and do to protect their real-world finances:

The closing credits are rolling for Blockbuster gift cards.

As part of its slow-motion bankruptcy, the once-ubiquitous renter of videos (how quaint!) has announced it will no longer honor gift certificates or gift cards after April 6, 2011.

Just a quick note to let the personal finance bloggers in the audience know that Taking Charge has been selected to host next Monday's version of the Carnival of Personal Finance. It will be the 295th edition of the weekly carnival, making it one of the oldest and certainly the most widely known in its genre. We've hosted four previous editions.

I got a gift card myself for Christmas, and I'm heading to Borders today to use it.

That's because news leaked out last week that the long-troubled bookseller has hired bankruptcy attorneys to help it sort through its options.

Consumers should do themselves a favor and get to the nearest Borders now to make sure they get full value from their gift cards. While Borders has said it still hopes to evade bankruptcy, I'd get there pronto, the history of retailers honoring gift cards after bankruptcy filing is mixed, and your rights to redeem that card are not guaranteed.

That does it. I'm using my elbows from now on to punch in my PIN number at an ATM.

Headline writer on both sides of the pond are having great sport scaring the public with the results of a new study showing that ATM keypads are as filthy as public toilets.

President Obama, sometimes criticized for an excess of coolness, had something close to an "I feel your pain" moment Friday -- and that pain was caused in no small part by his personal credit card use.

The moment came as he announced he had appointed Elizabeth Warren as a special Treasury adviser, a role in which she will shepherd into existence a new federal consumer watchdog agency.

A hearty hat tip to Danielle Liss, whose eponymous blog is the host of this week's Carnival of Personal Finance. A blog carnival is a roundup of other items from around the blogosphere, usually with a topic and a theme.

This week's topic, as always, was personal finance, and she themed it around the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11. She was kind enough to include my item from last week, "Old credit card brochure reveals age of innocence." So a hearty cheer (definitely not a Bronx one) to Danielle, and if you want a lot of good personal finance information packed in one place, sashay over to Carnival of Personal Finance No. 274: The I Love New York Edition."

I'm a history buff, and I work for CreditCards.com, so I got a kick out of finding the brochure whose cover is pictured at right. It shows a bit of credit card history from an innocent time when credit cards were a new concept.

It's a long story, but I ran across the brochure when cleaning out a house in South Florida.
I just love the wide-eyed look on the face of the stereotypical '60s woman, pearls and all: Wow! Free money! Little does she know.

Banking regulators did everything by the book in closing down the bank run by the family of Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic candidate for President Obama's old seat in the U.S. Senate.

Politics played no role in the timing of the April closing of Broadway Bank in Chicago, a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation investigation concluded.

We have written extensively about the issue of online gambling, since the most popular way to pay for that habit has been credit cards.

A 2006 federal law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, placed the onus on credit card issuers to make sure their cards weren't being used for online gambling.

Now, in a twist, California Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Jerry Brown has announced that his office will start using the Web to prevent problem gamblers from going into cardrooms. Instead of being part of the problem, his office is trying to make the Web part of the solution to problem gambling.

My thanks to Jason over at the blog Live Real, Now, for including the blog post by our editorial intern, Cara Henis, in the 270th edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance.

I got a kick out of the carnival's theme: Elvis is dead.

Thanks to Mary over at the blog Simply Forties for including my post, "Pat Bagley piratically skewers the credit carrrrrd industry," in the blog carnival she hosted today.