Tap That Asset
The Kardashians try to cash in on the bad economy's hottest new trend: the prepaid debit card.
Nevertheless, banks and financial companies are preparing to make the hard sell for prepaid debit. "We think that banks are going to start offering these as substitute bank accounts, not just for teenagers or the unbanked," Ben Jackson of Mercator predicts. "Regular checking accounts are becoming a lot less profitable [for banks, due to the Dodd-Frank law], and to a consumer, these cards can function almost exactly like a checkless checking account."
So maybe one day we all might be carrying the Kardashian Kard around with us, whether we like it or not. But for now, there's no real reason to keep up with them.
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Annie Lowrey, formerly Slate’s Moneybox columnist, is economic policy reporter for the New York Times.
Photograph of Kim Kardashian by Donna Ward/Getty Images.