Banking is a profitable business. But it is somewhat less profitable than it was a few years ago. A reasonable person might say "Good, a few years ago it was too profitable due to unfair business practices." Reasonable people are not bankers.
Michael Bloomberg is yet again treating Wall Street protesters' gripes with his unique style of empathy, "utter dismissiveness." The billionaire, who can thank the robust growth of the financial services sector over the decades for his fortune, knows the truth! The banks did nothing wrong; it was all Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Congress forcing everyone else to give houses to poor people.
There's no better argument against the privilege of wealth than Jon Corzine, the clownish former Goldman Sachs CEO who thought his facility for extracting money from a rigged financial game entitled him to run the state of New Jersey. After getting roundly rejected by voters after one term, he got a job from a friend running derivatives firm MF Global. Yesterday it went bankrupt. And today we learned that he's lost $700 million of his clients' money.
Let's not jump to conclusions about this video, which (at about a minute in) shows a woman dressed in a business suit, carrying her Citibank checkbook, trying to leave her bank only to be dragged back inside and arrested by a plainclothes NYPD officer.
Not to be outdone by Bank of America's rank avarice, Citibank announced today that it's raising monthly fees for checking accounts—doubling them, in fact, for its mid-level option—and bumping up the minimum balances. They're basically looking at their customers, identifying the ones who have the least amount of money, and charging them more.
The golden age of anonymous corporate elevator Twitter accounts is ending. It lasted about a week. After @CondeElevator closed down operations because "This got really crazy. Love my job," a series of knock-off elevator Twitter accounts launched. The only worthwhile one was @GSElevator, tweeting overheard conversations from Goldman Sachs branches the world around. According to Page Six, the company's notorious rigid management has "kicked off an internal probe" on the matter. After reportedly trying—and failing—to get Twitter to freeze the account, Goldman is now "investigating who is behind it. They believe it is an intern or a young gun, but there are enough facts on the feed for bosses to suspect it is someone with access inside the company."
Things are going about as expected for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman when he decided to take on the full brunt of the White House and the largest megabanks in the country by trying to investigate the full load of their mortgage-related crimes over the past decade: Somewhat difficultly.
Are you feeling the heat from debt collectors? Or maybe you just aren't sure how you'll make your next credit card payment? Whatever the case, just be thankful you don't owe money to Citibank in Indonesia. And if you do, don't accept an invitation to settle in the bank's interrogation room.
Ladies! Are you a bank teller? Are you looking for love? Meet Richard "Geovanni Kasanova" Dames, a 33-year-old Bronx resident who's looking for love. Also, he might use you to steal bank customers' identities.
If you see a woman with a beard drawn on her face, arrest her! Immediately! She may have just robbed two banks in Alabama. And ignore her bomb threat, too.
Well, here's a story not to think about next time you are in an enclosed space: A bank in Abbeville, La. that was undertaking renovations this year discovered a skeleton inside a chimney that had been closed for three decades.
We all know how banks screwed us over royally in the macro sense of the term, but it's nice to know that they still take out the time to deliver the shaft to their customers on an individual basis.
Be warned: You are going to be enraged when you hear this news, imbued with all the populist animalism you can muster and smashing crap all afternoon: Goldman Sachs is cutting some jobs in America and adding 1,000 people in Singapore. Are there even words to describe how much the average American will miss its favorite company?
Florida homeowners Maurenn Nyergers and her husband paid for their home in cash, and never took out a mortgage, so when Bank of America filed foreclosure papers on the house, they took the bank to court, and won. And when Bank of America wouldn't pay their legal fees — as it was ordered to by the court — their attorney, Todd Allen, decided to seize its assets, in person, with movers and sheriff's deputies in tow.
Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate and Harvard professor who's heading up the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in its infancy, stopped by the House of Representatives today for a hearing called — seriously — "Who's Watching the Watchmen?" It got kind of intense!
The next time you're getting drunk in some bar — let's call it Boomer's — and a stranger suddenly offers to take you to the bank and help you open up a new account, maybe don't go with them. Yeah, just keep on drinking.
You may be aware that the banking industry is currently engaged in a furious lobbying campaign to avoid the frightening prospect of being forced to lower the fees it charges retailers every time you use your debit card to buy something. It would just put "unfair profits" into the pockets of retailers, while forcing banks to raise the fees they charge you, the consumer, for every last thing! (According to the banking industry.)
