Finance Space

Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan, in his first week leading the largest U.S. lender, said the recession’s impact is fading and the bank’s biggest acquisitions are over, allowing him to focus on rebuilding relationships with customers.

“The worst is behind us in the sense of credit,” Moynihan, 50, said today during an interview on Bloomberg Television in Raleigh, North Carolina. “As an industry, we over-lent and customers over-borrowed, and that led to a fairly significant bubble,” he said. “If you could rewind the clock, you wouldn’t do those things again.”

New credit card data released Thursday by TransUnion.com shows the first quarter of 2008 marked the first dip in credit card debt and loan delinquencies since the beginning of 2007.

The Chicago-based credit and information management firm said average credit card debt and national credit card loan delinquency (the ratio of borrowers 90 or more days past due) had statistically relevant quarterly declines. National average credit card debt per credit card borrower dropped 1.25 percent to $1,673 since the fourth quarter of 2007, though the total remains 5.6 percent higher than $1,584 in the same period last year.

Prudential has launched a consumer finance business in Vietnam.

The group, which is the second-largest insurer in the UK, is one of only a few foreign financial institutions to have secured an operating licence in the country, which boasts one of the fastest growing economies in Asia.

The company has had a presence in the country since 1999, when it set up its insurance business.

Late last year, it launched a Vietnam Finance division, providing personal loans of up to $2,500, and now has plans to expand the business to include mortgages and credit card accounts.

Foreclosure prevention is a messy business — more art than science. Here, an inside look at why some people get a loan workout and others don’t.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — More than 3,000 times daily, struggling homeowners call the foreclosure Help Hotline for advice on how to save their homes.

And so begins the complicated and time-consuming foreclosure prevention process. Working together are mortgage servicers – the companies that manage the loans – and the borrowers, with foreclosure prevention counselors often acting as go-betweens.

One of the solutions that is often advertised to help people get out of debt is the use of a debt consolidation loan. The idea behind a debt consolidation loan is that most people who are in financial trouble have several small debts that require monthly payments. These payments combined become large enough that people generally end up paying just the minimums, and never are able to chip away at their borrowed balance. A debt consolidation loan offers some advantages to other debt reduction alternatives, but also has some negative factors to be aware of. Some of the pros and cons include: