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.
The cheap, rickety county fair clown car that is the US stock market took another nice little dive today: down 389 points, or 3.2%. Just your standard "Europe has no money left" fears. A decade ago this would have been considered a fairly horrific one-day collapse, but lately these swings of several hundred points per day have become as commonplace as the various Wall Street jokes which we are too sophisticated to make.
Having systematically driven the traditional "small town American" hardware store, drug store, grocery store, clothing store, auto parts store, and general store out of business, Wal-Mart has been sitting around, scratching its imaginary head, wondering "What part of traditional American business can I co-opt next, further reducing the traditional American downtown business district to a desolate wasteland and forcing citizens to conduct any and all monetary transactions beneath the sheltering sky of harsh neon lights inside of our very own big, inescapable box?"
If you have to be alive in America today, you really want to be a wealthy middle-aged white male ensconced in an exurban hideaway surrounded by high walls and mile upon mile of coiled razor. What you don't want to be is... anything other than that. Until the revolution comes, at least.
In your manic Monday media column: Hackgate grows marginally dirtier, journalism majors make dat money, Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs, the media lies, and Martin Nisenholtz retires.
For the past... I don't know, hundred years? It feels like it's been a hundred years since this recession began. Perhaps fewer. Anyhow, things have been bleak for a while. But unwrap your lips from that loaded handgun, poverty-stricken American: things are statistically better than you thought!
For at least several months now, convenient caffeinated masturbatorium Starbucks has been quietly waging war against the laptop hobos who fill its seats all day to "work on that screenplay" (browse Craigslist sex ads) while nursing a single drink. Now, the evidence is in: busting laptop hobo riff-raff= big buck$$$!
The markets are crashing again today, no big deal. It happens every couple of weeks now. Regular 300-point daily fluctuations? Pish posh. It provides an opportunity for traders and Wall Street insiders to take easy profits on the meaningless gyrations of the market at the expense of the average investor. Just another day. You have bigger things to worry about.
Now Sun Trust and and Regions Financial have joined Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in deciding that charging customers debit card fees on purchases is a stupid idea, the Wall Street Journal reports. This makes Bank of America the only loser bank among America's largest loser banks to keep its $5 fee plan. Way to stay strong, guys!
Not so long ago, Bank of America decided that a good way to refill its slightly-less-bulging-than-usual pockets would be to charge people a monthly fee for their debit cards. "This won't cause a massive public backlash at all, probably," they thought to themselves, while setting a box of puppies aflame.
A majority of unemployed Americans say they're confident that they'll find a job in the next year—a better job, at that. Meanwhile, college grads as a group are despondent over their own economic prospects. Now: considering the state of college in this country, we hesitate to make too much out of a college education. But when all the people who may have actually taken an economics class are the most pessimistic, we'd gently suggest that that's a bad sign. Perhaps the unemployed should tone down that optimism just a bit.
Here's the way it is: the rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. The middle class is disappearing. Prices are rising. Hope is fading. But uh... don't let it get you down.
Are you poor and homeless and starving and sick of trying to fix things through the usual channels, which are all broken? Fear not! There may be a secret remedy that you haven't considered: President Obama's personal checkbook. Because he'll occasionally send personal checks to struggling people who write him with their horror stories. Just make sure to include all the gritty details.
Here's the type of blatantly contradictory and self-harming political belief that Americans are famous for: during this recession, support for redistribution of wealth has actually gone down. (This is why every American political economist is for shit, historically.) Researchers publishing in Scientific American suggest the problem is that we are willing to throw the poorest members of society to the economic wolves in order to ensure that we always have someone to look down on:
As the dying middle class sees its children swallowed by the student debt bubble as they desperately take out loans to afford college degrees from their likely substandard schools, it's worth remembering the fact that the vast majority of college students in this country are part-timers who will never graduate. You'll never guess how much money we're wasting on remedial English classes! From the LA Times:
