Great work, science: you've made old people live longer. You've successfully extended the most unhappy years of our lives. And the financial sector has done its part by vaporizing all of your money, by gambling. The result? There is no such thing as "inheritance" any more.
Why are banks so enthusiastic about marketing their products to college students? Because college students, like most young people, don't know shit about shit. But unlike most kids, they have some money (even if they borrowed it). That means they are easy marks, and lucrative ones. A college student might think: "My school will protect my financial interests." See? I told you they were easy marks.
"What is going on with the economy these days?" you ask yourself as you sit on the bench in the park where you go every day after you tell your wife you're "going to work." I'm glad that you asked, brother. If you sort of squint and turn things sideways ever so slightly, it is possible to interpret recent economic trends in a positive way.
If ever you become misty-eyed and soft-hearted after watching a few too many soft-focus sunlight-drenched bank ads full of friendly professional women and smiling minorities who've just bought their first homes, it's good to remind yourself that big banks are, fundamentally, soulless robots whose only aim is to extract as much money as possible from you via any tactics they're allowed to get away with. They are the bloodsuckers of the poor. There is no better example of this than prepaid debit cards.
Whatever happened to that guy, baldie, the funny mustache man, the one who was momentarily taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America? Pizza guy? Oh, I see—he's just writing op-eds in the WSJ to reconfirm his fundamental lunacy. What say you, Herman Cain?
The recent global economic collapse combined with the cravenness of the banking industry and the general cheez-brained of the American public have made it all but inevitable that eventually the general public would simply start hoarding their few remaining valuables in iron boxes built into their bedframes and/ or outhouses. Some in the safe industry are "reporting sales increases of as much as 40 percent from a few years ago." But what are you people keeping in there?
America is currently embroiled in a student loan bubble and when it pops, wooo buddy. *Makes whistling sound, gazes off into distance*... let's just say that I hope you can use some lacquer and a long stick to turn your college diploma into some sort of edged weapon to fight off the starving graduate student food mobs. Let's just leave it at that. Let's not get explicit, except to say that banks will literally take your mother's home if you try to not pay them back, so, you know, the weapon thing is maybe the way to go.
While we've all been wringing our hands while trapped over here on this "side of the pond" (Atlantic Ocean) worrying about if and when the second dip of the Double Dip Recession With No Fucking Sprinkles™ would arrive, that clever old recession was slinking "across the pond" (Atlantic Ocean) to rear its ugly, stupid, money-sucking head in "Jolly" (not so jolly now I bet, ha) Olde Englande. From the NYT:
Kids these days don't know about money. The problem, as laid out in this USA Today story, is devastatingly simple: today's high school students can't pass simple tests of financial literacy, even though they will most likely be heavily in debt and facing poor job prospects within a decade. Furthermore, most states don't teach kids anything about the topic.
A judge has ruled that Sam Zell—the gnomish billionaire and purposeful asshole who singlehandedly bankrupted the Tribune Co. in one short year, thanks to his own personal greed and incompetence—will be the very last creditor to get paid out in the company's bankruptcy proceedings. Dead last. Zell has $315 million of his own money at stake.
Now that the Great Recession has been over for a really long time *coughs up lung*, it's a great time to take a broad survey of the vibrant US economy and see how well all of it is doing, what with the recovery and all. How are massive corporations doing? How are common folks doing? Let's review.
Stacy Knutson, a waitress at The Fryn' Pan restaurant in Moorhead, Minnesota, is exceptionally honest. When a customer left $12,000 in cash in a takeout container on one of Knutson's tables, she followed the customer out into the parking lot and tried to return it. The customer said, quote, "No, I am good, you keep it." Okay, so, what is the problem here?
Are you the type of person who buys experiences, or the type of person who buys things? You're the type of person who buys Funyuns. Yes, we know. But what you do with those Funyuns reveals whether or not you are a huge jerk.
This qualifies as a bit of a vague, not totally well-established-in-a-statistical-way trend; but the fact that it exists at all for one single person in America is, I believe, newsworthy. Families are taking out tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans in order to pay for private kindergarten for their whelps. That is some fucked up shit.
According to a new WSJ survey of executive pay here in the US of A, Hooverville capital of the Western Hemisphere, CEOs of some of the world's biggest companies are being underappreciated, when it comes to the height and breadth of the pile of doubloons they are awarded at the conclusion of the fiscal year.
Private equity kingpin and walking manifestation of bad PR for the top 1% Stephen Schwarzman had a great, great year this year. This rich, selfish bastard—who compared a plan to raise taxes on private equity firms to Hitler invading Poland, and who stated that his number one New Year's wish, in the midst of the worst recession in a century, was to create a "tax-free zone" for wealthy foreign nationals in New York—had an outstanding 2011, compensation-wise.
Santa Monica College is an absolutely god damn humongous community college in California. They have a problem faced by many such institutions these days: no money$$$ from their broke-ass state government, and one bazillion kids trying to get in, because everyone is poor and shit these days. How to take advantage of one of these problems to solve the other? Charge more money$$$, for the "good" classes!
