Payday -

Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised to see that the deal is off. NetSpend would have to be very comfortable with risk to try to get investors to buy shares now. Would it even fetch $10 now? I don't know. I'm going to go back to the 10-Ks and the S1 to see how much revenue will be lost without the i-advance.

Rene - I don't know what GDV means, but I can say that this is an excellent bit of analysis.

Great news about the Supervisory Directive.

That's an interesting point. Maybe the banks do stop some fraud. Certainly, they also experience losses, too.

The pressing question is what is the IRS going to do next.

Thanks for sharing the humor on web traffic!

Joe --
You know, I agree with you that there is a pressing problem with how some tax payers are going to settle the costs of their tax preparation. If the IRS is going to change the debt indicator, then they should probably do it as soon as possible. It is a very important point and it is very relevant to any conversation about RALs right now.

I'd also concede that Block is going to have a very powerful advantage in the market going forward.

Is 36 percent fair? It is legal, I'll give you that.

About Bank Talk - it looks to me like Bank Talk is about four to five times more popular than Pacific Capital's web site. We're ranked 123,000 in US sites, whereas PCBC is about 460,000th. So in terms of a place for getting out a message, this is the forum.

Joe --

Maybe there is an important distinction between your calculation and our calculation. We're factoring in what the consumer experiences. RALs come with add-in fees. That's part of the problem - the consumer gets dinged by the tax preparer once the RAL account has been established. I know that the banks don't get all of that RAL money. Mo' Money, for instance, was charging a technology fee and an e-file fee on top of the RAL interest that Chase charged. Sure, the RAL is only 36 percent from the bank's perspective, but it is much higher from the consumer's perspective.

Bank Talk gets about 1000 hits a day.