About Kathy Chu

Kathy Chu is a business reporter who has led USA TODAY's credit card and banking coverage since 2005. Before working at the paper, she covered personal finance and corporate bankruptcies for Dow Jones News Service, and wrote for the Wall Street Journal and Newsday. Her features about Hurricane Katrina's economic toll on the Gulf Coast won her a 2008 award from the Association for Women in Communications and a piece about employees signing away their right to sue won a 2004 Front Page Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York. Chu was also a finalist in 2006 for the ONA Online Journalism Award for her "Couples and Cash" series. Along with USA TODAY colleagues Sandra Block and John Waggoner, she authored "The Busy Family's Guide to Money," published in 2008. She has a masters of science in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stories

Digital media stories published elsewhere by Kathy Chu:

  • Couples and Cash [edit]
    Meet our Money Makeover couples: These couples opened up their financial lives to USA TODAY and the Financial Planning Association. They were matched with financial planners to define their goals and map a path to reach them. Each Monday, we'll profile a couple, and each Friday, we'll offer tips on handling your own finances.
  • Mobile taquerias bring new flavors to New Orleans [edit]
    The smell of sizzling beef and warm flour tortillas beckons from a food truck perched at an intersection here. Food trucks such as this one — offering flavorful, cheap and authentic Latin-American fare — were all but non-existent before Katrina. They now dot the landscape in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Their regular customers are the Hispanic laborers who have migrated here to rebuild homes, but they've also built a following among local residents. Not everyone's a fan. In June, the Jefferson Parish Council voted unanimously to bar mobile vendors from setting up shop at some of the busiest thoroughfares in the area.
  • Dreams of Steady Work Fade for Hispanic Workers [edit]
    Since Hurricance Katrina, tens of thousands of Hispanic workers, most of them undocumented, have poured into battered sections of the Gulf Coast. They've supplied the labor to rebuild, to keep businesses running and to boost tax revenue. To support their families back home, they often will work longer hours and for less pay than other laborers. Yet the economic dream that drew them here has weakened. For some, pay is falling. And jobs are scarcer, because the most urgent work — gutting homes and removing debris — is mostly finished. Though years of rebuilding remain, not enough state and insurance money has arrived to pay for it.
  • Ford Hopes Free Driver's Ed in Vietnam Leads to Sales [edit]
    In Vietnam, Ford and other carmakers are using a unique campaign to hook consumers with their cars: Driving schools. Ford's driving school in Ho Chi Minh City aims to teach a nation of bikers and walkers to drive a car.
  • Vietnam's economy lures back some who left in the 1970s [edit]
    When the Vietnam War ended 35 years ago, millions of Vietnamese fled a communist country whose growth had been stymied by war, oppression and uncertainty, seeking a better life for themselves and their children in the USA, Canada and Europe. Today, some of those who left years ago now look at Vietnam as a land of opportunity. At least 500,000 Viet Kieu return every year to this nation of 86 million, some to stay. As a growing number invest in Vietnam, it's creating jobs and fueling the country's economy. But the investment may also be seen as "condoning the government's lack of freedoms for the country," says Thuy Vo Dang, a visiting scholar at UCLA's Asian American Studies Center.

Writing

Content on this site written by Kathy Chu (includes contributory writing):

  • Projects

    • Youth Radio
    • Hip hop. Rhythm. Rock. The voice of the urban street. Oakland teens find in Youth Radio a home away from home. And much more. For thousands, the towering red-brick building ...