Presented (mostly) without comment…
Remember Catherine Rampell's odious "economists say..." construction that blithely hid a number of faulty or dangerous assumptions in the New York Times? Jessica Silver-Greenburg and Tara Siegel Bernard write today about why we don't need to be worried at all by renewed subprime lending.
"Regulators with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees the nation’s largest banks, said that as long as lenders adhered to strict underwriting standards and monitored risk, there was nothing inherently dangerous about extending credit to a wider swath of people.
In fact, an increase in lending is a sign that the economy is improving, economists say. While unemployment remains high, consumers have been reducing their debts. Delinquencies on credit card accounts and auto loans are down sharply from their heights in the crisis. “This is a natural loosening of credit standards because the banks feel they can expand again,” said Michael Binz, a managing director at Standard & Poor’s."
For a thorough discussion of underwriting and the repeal of Rule 415, obviously the entirety of Yves Smith's eCONned is to be recommended. But for a brief overview, we need look no further than a post on Naked Capitalism. Yves Smith and Tom Adams write (emphasis in original):
"In the market for private loans, who wanted bad loans?
Had the FCIC report bothered to connect the dots raised by this simple question, it could have actually contributed something.
By blaming regulators (and the rating agencies), the report makes it seem as if it was just about what the lenders could get away with. But that same argument could be applied to any credit market, yet the US mortgage market was rife with remarkably crappy loans. And lenders still would suffer negative consequences for selling a bad product, even if they could get away with it for a while, such as loss of reputation due to inferior deal performance, losses on retained interests, and poor pricing for the drecky mortgages.
Along a similar line, the report notes that bonuses skyrocketed for the industry during the bubble years. Where did this money come from? Why had the mortgage industry never before generated such high compensation?
The obvious answer is that good loans did not generate hugely excessive bonuses, but bad loans did."
Nowhere in the Times article are the standards for undewriting or Rule 415 mentioned. And as has been well-documented, outsize compensation at financial firms has certainly been solved. I'm sure there's enough material daily in the Times for a small book about how the paper lazily inflates, and then fails to explain, economic bubbles.
“From now on, we’re alternating Cindy Crawford’s “Aerobicise” and “Buns of Steel”, and reading one non-school book a week. My first book is Fit or Fat.”
Today's article in the LA Times, “Obesity epidemic may have roots in 1950's” is especially humorous when compared to one of the headline stories in Salon today, “Why women need fat.”
Shari Roan's LA Times piece is a classic morality tale: Women in the 1950's did horrible things, like smoking and not breastfeeding, and now 55 years later the obesity epidemic is in full swing.
“Indeed, scientists are coming to realize that subtle changes in our genetic material — technically known as epigenetic changes — can alter the way that genes are turned on and off, in ways that affect the body's functioning.
Sothern thinks the obesity trinity [smoking, not breastfeeding, and restricting weight gain during pregnancy] tweaked our genetic material to make us prone to pack on pounds.”
Nevermind that tinkering with our genetic material is one of the major benefits of sexual reproduction, there's a panic to inflate! Roan continues: “It can take as little as two generations for our genes to be programmed in ways that tip us toward obesity. It may take more generations than that to reverse the damage done.”
So how are a bunch of people with no jobs and no health insurance going to go about the business of “reversing the damage” done to our precious genes?
“Women should breast-feed for at least six months after childbirth or — better yet — take one year off from work and breast-feed. They should not smoke.”
I like how the bit about taking off work for a year is book-ended by the (less) outrageous recommendations about smoking and breastfeeding. Ladies! Just take a year off after each pregnancy. Seriously, having children has literally no adverse effects on a woman's economic future anyway, so what's stopping you from pausing your career for somewhere between two and four years? But don't take that time all at once. Because having babies too close together can also cause obesity. So, basically, just never work.
Buried in the LA Times article is a key bit of information: women were adopting some of these “obesity-causing practices,” notably restricting weight gain during pregnancy, on the advice of their obstetricians. In light of the obesity epidemic, obstetricians are now... recommending obese women gain less weight during pregnancy. Let's see how Roan seamless guides through this contradictory conclusion. (It's telling that that the only cultural touchstone we have for maternity in the 1960s is a character introduced in 2007).
1) “Women in the 1950s and 1960s — think Betty Draper on the hit TV show "Mad Men" — were generally advised to restrict weight gain in pregnancy to as little as 10 pounds. Inadequate nutrition in some of these women could easily have programmed their babies to catch up on growth during infancy — and studies suggest such growth spurts increase the risk of later obesity.”
2) “Over-nourished kids grew up to be over-nourished women, producing large babies. Large babies, just like too-small babies, are at heightened risk of obesity...”
3) “In 2009, the Institute of Medicine introduced limits on how much weight an obese woman should gain during pregnancy; critics felt the board should have gone further.”
Cycle complete! We should have an entirely new horde of obese babies in 30 years! Or maybe not. Because if you read Salon.com this morning instead of the LA Times, you'd be told just the opposite.
“The result of natural selection is that women tend to be lighter before they have a child because they need their first infant to be smaller in order to survive childbirth. Each infant that a woman has remodels the pelvis so that each subsequent infant can grow somewhat bigger. There is a positive correlation between birth order and birth weight. So the way to grow a bigger infant is for the mother to have more fat on her body.”
Moreover: “I’m not saying that obesity is optimal, but all the findings show that overweight women survive better than normal weight women. We walk a fine line in the book because we argue that being overweight is not nearly as bad as your doctor has been telling you, but on the other hand, Americans are heavier than they need to be.”
So there you go, ladies. Get to losing weight, gaining weight, taking a year off from work, stopping your genes from mutating so we can achieve some putatively better genetic material, and most importantly, not reading either the LA Times or Salon for useful medical information.
Some Journalists Are Bigger Than Others
The Journalist's Creed, written by Walter Williams from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, contains the following declaration: “I believe that advertising, news and editorial columns should alike serve the best interests of readers; that a single standard of helpful truth and cleanness should prevail for all; that the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service.” According to David Carr, we may as well just replace the First Amendment with the journalist's creed and be done with it.
Some background: Crystal Cox calls herself an investigative blogger. In the course of her blogging career, she got a Matt Taibbi-level hard-on for Kevin Padrick of Obsidian Financial Group. Padrick was acting as a Trustee in a bankruptcy case. Cox's blog obsidianfinancesucks.com alleges that Padrick was “under contract with the debtor before being court-appointed as a trustee." The heart of Padrick's complaint was that Cox made her allegations too prominent in Google rankings and thus tarnished his reputation with potential clients. One specific post in particular was judged defamatory by a jury and a judge award $2.5 million in damages.
Dan Kennedy at the HuffPost had a very thoughtful analysis of the ruling on Friday: “The Supreme Court has always been clear that the First Amendment is for all of us, not just for credentialed journalists. In fact, in the 1972 case of Branzburg v. Hayes the court ruled that journalists could not claim a constitutional privilege to protect their sources precisely because "liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer ... just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher." And what is a blogger in 2011 other than today's lonely pamphleteer?”
Likwise Dan Gillmor, that elder statesman of media analysis, who wrote in the Guardian: “As more and more people do what we recognise as journalism, however, legislators in jurisdictions that do have shield laws need to recognise the essential role of news providers. They should do so with an eye toward the practice, not the person. This will make life more complicated for judges, perhaps, but it will also ensure that we don't create a government-approved journalistic aristocracy. In the end, that would serve only the interests of the government and the aristocrats, not the rest of us.”
Ok, back to David Carr. On Friday, David Carr wrote a blog post that he later described as “filled with filial umbrage.” It tepidly lays out the facts found in the Seattle Weekly, Forbes, The Oregonian and the AP. Over the weekend, Carr apparently rewatched Page One and was inspired by Bill Keller's resignation, because he revisited the topic today. Leading with the headline “When Truth Survives Free Speech” Carr takes a few paragraphs to get to the heart of his complaint:
“In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence.”
Now, I'm pretty sure the headline alone should disqualify someone from becoming a journalist. The entire point of the First Amendment is to protect wrong, immoral speech- even speech that advocates violence.
I can't fault Carr for advocating a position, I think that's wise. And, so far, his summary of Cox's allegations and the substance of the lawsuit has been the most clear and thorough. But his analysis boils down to the fact that Carr finds Padrick sympathetic and rational, and Cox insane and untrustworthy. Carr talks to both Padrick and Cox, the chairwoman of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee and some unnamed “lawyers who had done business with Mr. Padrick.” (I would love to know the reasons for anonymity in that case.)
For balance, he does speak to Cox, but the evidence used to discredit her is flimsy, and some of it is clearly sourced from Padrick himself. Take this:
“When she gets in a fight with someone, she frequently responds by creating a domain with the person’s name, some allegation of corruption, or both. Many of the negative posts about Mr. Padrick appeared on obsidianfinancesucks.com and there are many more like it. In order to optimize visibility to Web crawlers, she often uses the full name and title of her target, and her Web sites are filled with links to her other sites to improve their search ranking. She has some 500 URLs at her disposal and she’s not afraid to use them”
There are no sources or examples of other negative URLs, although Carr earlier mentioned some of Cox's shadow sites with frightening names like Bend Oregon News, Bankruptcy Corruption, and Northwest Tribune. Then a few paragraphs later, Carr drops this: “Mr. Padrick signed off by reminding me that those who have been in conflict with Ms. Cox frequently find their names showing up in newly registered Web addresses.”
It's far easier to be skeptical of some woman with a blog than a man who's a member of the bar in four states. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Especially when the person you could be scrutinizing is a treasure trove as vast as this Padrick character. Writing to the Seattle Weekly, Padrick pens an Orwellian ode to free speech, its perversity matched only by its inelegant prose:
“What some reporters writing on this topic are missing is that cheapening the definition of media is far more of an attack on true media (and the First Amendment) than anything else. When everyone is media the concept of media is gone for all purposes. The real threat here is not defining media too narrowly, but defining it too broadly. (As to our case remember that Cox presented no evidence that she was media regardless of how it was defined unless the definition is that anyone with a computer is media.)”
Yes, I definitely agree that unalienable rights can be too broadly defined. Let's hammer out that “pursuit of happiness” thing. Proposing to include anyone who has a computer as the media is straw man. We're talking about specific computer owners, in this case bloggers, which is not that large a group.
There are two things to keep in mind about this, I think, that haven't been mentioned elsewhere. The first is this 2009 article from New York Review of Books about British libel laws and how they all but prevent investigations into complex matters. Everyone should recall Obama's hostilities with Fox News in 2009 . The Treasury even tried to exclude Fox from a briefing, but journalistic community pushed back. (As they should.) If journalism can embrace a Murdoch-owned machine as a journalistic outlet, then it's big enough to include investigative bloggers: even when they're not truthful.
Tis the Season!
It's hard to tell whether it's the Occupy movement, or the impending 2012 election, that's forced a return to candidate-Obama. This progressive creature, rarely seen while in office, appeared briefly in Kansas on Tuesday and reiterated many of his 2008 campaign promises that he has seemingly abandoned as president. Robert Reich, a man I respect, if only for his commitment to participating in Occupy teach-ins, was pretty hopeful. In a nearly line-by-line analysis of Obama's speech, Reich finds reason to hope for the authoritative action that has so far been missing:
"Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we’ve had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to."
Clearly, I'm far more cynical than the former labor secretary. Maybe that's because I'm in the middle of Confidence Men by Ron Suskind. In it, the following illuminating passage appears describing a March 2009 meeting between Obama and the CEOs of the six major banks (via A Tiny Revolution):
"But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. 'You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem,' he said. 'And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices.'
According to one of the participants, he then said, 'I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation.'
...After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show."
On Tuesday, in Kansas, Obama explained that if we re-elect him, he'll make sure the punishment fits the crime:
"We shouldn't be weakening oversight and accountability. We should be strengthening oversight and accountability. I'll give you another example. Too often, we've seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there's no price for being a repeat offender. No more. I'll be calling for legislation that makes those penalties count so that firms don't see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business."
But not only did Obama already declare that the most of the practices that led to the financial crisis "weren't illegal," he's staffed the Treasury with former Clintonites who oversaw the growth of these "not illegal" practices. From Confidence Men:
"...That another Treasury nominee from the Clinton days was busy ducking and dodging questions from a Democratic senator revealed unresolved issues inside the administration. Despite the president's publicly stated anger at Wall Street and its practices, Summers and Emmanuel were sticking to their program, under which former officials from the Clinton era were never to admit to any errors in pushing deregulatory efforts."
So the growth of the "not illegal" practices was rampant under the Clinton-era advisors and appointments, who are now advising and being appointed by Obama. This basically shores up what Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald have been saying: Obama makes concessions because he wants to, not because his hand is forced or he's inept. Progressives are going to have to steel themselves and refuse to be comforted by his promising words on Tuesday. My hope is that the Occupy movement, who should count the Kansas speech as another political victory, will be able to keep the pressure on the president and on our representatives.
Anyway, as someone who was affected (for days) by the power outages after the windstorm in Los Angeles last week, I can say that I'm very glad we spent the last thirty or so years investing in financial derivatives and not infrastructure. Money well spent.
US Notices UC Davis
I attended UC Davis as an undergraduate from 1999-2003. The campus was founded when Berkeley bought a farm to create an agricultural campus. Today, the university is home to a national-class veterinary school and a world-renowned enology program. For students, Davis remains a sleepy, bike-friendly hamlet in California's central valley. Tony Judt, who spent a not-unhappy sabbatical at UC Davis, described it as “halfway between San Francisco and nowhere in particular.” Perhaps the city's permanent residents fit the California stereotype of irreligious liberals, but my initial impression of Davis as an undergraduate was that I had come to a commuter school in California's Bible Belt: Davis draws heavily on students from nearby rural areas like Grass Valley, Truckee, and Colfax. Each weekend of my freshman year (and even beyond), the dorms would empty out as students went home to do laundry, see their hometown boy- and girlfriends, and attend their home churches. A 2008 study of campus climate reveals that over half of Davis students identify themselves as members of a religion or generally spiritual. My undergraduate years were marked by a pervasive, almost relentless, sense of calm and well-being. I remember people having to travel to nearby Sacramento or San Francisco to participate in anti-war protests during my senior year. When I was accepted to graduate school, my mentor congratulated me and said that this could serve as a reminder to my fellow students that we “weren't on the edge of the world.”
So, to see students in 2011 being arrested for their participation in Occupy protests represents a shift in Davis culture so seismic as to be unimaginable to me. I can't help but think that the demand for Occupy to identify an ideology or set of demands is an attempt to geographically isolate or discredit the movement. The beauty of Occupy is that it's completely flexible and almost infinite in its reach. So a sixth-year senior (hey, it happens) at the University of California who has seen his tuition rates double since 2005 can find a home in the Occupy movement to protest a proposed tuition hike of 16 percent per year, for the next four years. And when a Chancellor who makes $400,000 a year orders you removed, the fact that what you're protesting is something intimately connected to your own life can only help. Instead of adopting a set of demands for regulation on Wall Street or other high-minded, if wonkish, policy ideals, the flexibility of the Occupy movement means it can motivate participants by emphasizing local community issues. And let's face it: if you're going to convince a bunch of kids to come sit in the cold and get pepper sprayed in the face by police in riot gear, you're really going to have to motivate them. This is all to say: I'm extremely proud of these students at my alma mater.
On a somewhat related note, what's with the “we,” Joan Walsh? “This is how 'we' win this?” How about after “we” put ourselves in bodily danger or risk “our” future employability by getting arrested, “we” can lecture one another about “our” commitment to nonviolence? It'd be great if Walsh could get half as outraged about real police violence against actual human protesters as she does about Occupy Oakland equivocating about whether or not to issue a condemnation of violent tactics. But, hey, Obama 2012! Gingrich, or whatever.
An Audience of 320
Back when Gawker introduced their preposterous "Banhammer" feature, I thought to myself, "Nick Denton won't be happy until his website's audience consists entirely of people already working in the media." They can make on-topic, predictable jokes and capitalize the first letters of all their sentences. Gawker's been suffering from an air of pervasive self-congratulation since their redesign, and we all know if you're going to cater to the media, you have to be as self-important as possible.
I thought this all was a joke, but then today:
"...also naming NBC's Brian Williams as a Gawker devotee who's a model for the kind of commenter he'd [Nick Denton] like to attract."
This truly bizarre post of John Cook's makes more sense now. I can totally imagine Brian Williams agreeing with that.
Chelsea Explains It All, Part II
After I wrote yesterday about Chelsea Clinton's fortuitous new employment, Michael Calderone over at HuffPost published a piece on the journalistic community's reaction. He prominently featured complaints by NYT reporters about Chelsea Clinton's reluctance to submit to a press interview. One thing I wanted to touch on quickly: I think it's amazing that a bunch of NYT reporters can complain about their inability to get an interview with Chelsea Clinton while she was campaigning for her mother, but that fact appears nowhere in the story in their own paper ostensibly devoted to dissecting NBC's hiring decision. And by my count, no one points out the NYT's omission in their original story. So basically, unless you have a long memory, or follow the ins and outs of the media as a hobby, you'd have no way of knowing that there was any an apparent contradiction between this career move and Clinton's prior actions. Calderone says that the NYT got the scoop on Chelsea's new employ before the press release was circulated. One of the first questions when I saw the NYT story was why it hadn't been assigned to Brian Stelter. I mean, he got his start covering TV news, he might have an interesting perspective. I, in no way, mean to deflect criticism from NBC. But the NYT is at fault too. It was given the lead on this and had a chance to craft the story from a potentially interesting angle and it failed.
Today another story came out explaining how much Americans hate the media. Can't imagine why.
How To Succeed in American Media Without Really Trying
Chelsea explains it all. [photo: Kyle Cassidy via Wikipeida
NBC, of course, also hired Jenna Bush Hager, and MSNBC, of course, hired Meghan McCain. Hamilton Nolan, writing for Gawker, laments that this is further evidence of the decline of serious television news. Even Glenn Greenwald, usually thorough to a fault, has sort of had it with this whole phenomenon and his post today is uncharacteristically short. And Poynter, still reeling from their own mini-scandal with Romenesko last week, has remained silent.
Which means there's some important work to be done looking at the original reporting of this story, namely the New York Times piece that announced this decision:
The New York Times goes ahead and runs some helpful Chelsea Clinton PR, anonymously reported of course, because no one can risk their reputation by relating such damaging facts as:
“...Ms. Clinton had been more active in causes backed by her family’s William J. Clinton Foundation, and that she had, in fact, spoken at more than 400 town halls in 2008 in support of her mother’s candidacy.”
“...Ms. Clinton had said she intended to donate most of the money she earned from NBC to the Clinton Foundation and the George Washington University Hospital in the name of her grandmother, who died this month.”
Even leaving aside how lazy it is to rely on anonymous sources for this sort of thing, the closest thing to a difficult question reporter Bill Carter puts to NBC News president Steve Capus has no follow-up and no sting:
“Mr. Capus said the issue of the other political daughters did not come up in his conversations with Ms. Clinton.
But Mr. Capus emphasized that this, and the others, are all serious hires by NBC News. He said Ms. Clinton had 'made it very clear that this is not going to be a surface-deep relationship.' He added, 'She wants to be in the field for the shoot and in the edit room for the edit.'”
Aside from the strange fact that NBC News' hire is apparently dictating the terms of their working relationship, this response does not address the implication behind the original question. This hiring decision by NBC is the worst kind of craven pandering. As our national press corps starts to beat the drum for another invasion, I don't think many of us in civilian-land particularly want a repeat of the “debate” leading up to the Iraq invasion. Yet our national press corps seemed staffed with people who've been trained to do exactly that: summarize debate talking points and rarely engage political decision-makers in a rigorous argument.
Most revealing, Capus explains the arduous NBC hiring process: “Mr. Capus said an intermediary contacted him in July with word that 'she [Chelsea Clinton] was kicking around what she wanted to do next.'” And then she had a meeting! With the president of NBC News! And he really put her through the ringer:
“Mr. Capus said he had met with Ms. Clinton and had a long conversation that began with a simple question. 'I asked her: ‘What are you interested in doing?’ '
Ms. Clinton told him, he said, that during her mother’s campaign for president in 2008, she had been moved by stories of people making personal contributions.”
So, Chelsea Clinton's experience comes from campaigning for her mother, the current Secretary of State. A job she got by virtue of being an object of sympathy amongst certain factions as a result of her father's presidency. Oh, and anyone else remember how Chelsea refused to talk to reporters while campaigning for her mother? It seems like there was significant room for some interesting questions for Capus.
I won't even go into the fact that young, unconnected journalists are expected to work-for-free (even sacrificing paying jobs) in order to make their way in the media eco-system.
I remember when Obama had his ill-advised Twitter press conference. Michael D. Shear scoffed: “Most of the Twitter queries were not very tough-minded and gave the president the opportunity to repeat his talking points.” But for a media reporter to leave several worrying questions about Chelsea Clinton's hire unasked doesn't speak to a “tough-minded” ideal that's meant to direct the conversation away from the interviewee's talking points. Indeed, reporting like this shores up my original complaints about Page One, the New York Times documentary from earlier this summer. The New York Times may experience moments of muckraking investigation, but there's little doubt that they remain slavishly devoted to the current political order of things.
Chelsea Clinton and Jenna Bush Hager and Meghan McCain are a way to swell the ranks of NBC's female journalists without actually introducing any of the co-occuring and discomforting views that come with diversity. Hires like this are why I'm wary of things like The Count. We don't necessarily need more women in journalism, or fiction, or any field. What we need is a discussion that admits a wider range of views and reporters whose loyalties lie not with their career-politician parents, but with the citizens of this country. Those views might come from white women, or gay men, or Arab and muslim men, or women of color, but they probably won't come from people whose continued relevance relies on the well-being of their parent's careers.
Well, I Didn’t Love You Anyway!
So the line on Bank Transfer Day seems to be that it's good for the large banks that were losing money on small depositors.
Here's the Christian Science Monitor, with some choice imagery:
“People are going to be moving to credit unions, and that’s good for them because they’re going to have lower fees, they’re going to have better service, they’re going to have the feeling that they are investing in their community. And then the banks are going to be better off because they are getting rid of their least-profitable or not profitable clients. It helps them stem this tsunami of cash that’s been flowing in that they don’t know what to do with.”
And here's the Wall Street Journal with the same line:
“One reason: People who gravitate to credit unions tend to be unprofitable for giant banks because of the small balances they keep on deposit, low number of products they buy and the relatively high account-maintenance expenses at big financial firms.”
So, given their enormous increase in deposits, credit unions are likely attracting not only people traditionally drawn to credit unions, but people who are generally fed up. I remember reading this piece by Matt Taibbi and thinking that I really needed to stop postponing my leave from Bank of America:
“And here’s my question today for folks keeping their money at Bank of America: How psyched are you today to have your bank downgraded to just above junk status even before the inevitable implosion of the Countrywide portfolio, that Yucca Mountain of deadly and still-severely-overmarked mortgages that BofA is toting along?"
Now, I don't necessarily blame (Bank Transfer Day creator) Kristen Christian for not highlighting this malfeasance and instability on the part of the banks as part of her campaign. But I do think that outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor should be required to think more deeply than regurgitating the big banks' press releases. I don't think that many of the protesters are delusional. I know I don't think BofA is sweating my paltry savings and bimonthly direct deposit. But what they should be sweating is that there's a profound and prolonged discontentment throughout the population, one that threatens to be last longer than any PR campaign. Add to that their real troubles, including a couple AGs bucking on the foreclosure issue, and suddenly the world starts looking a little differently. In 2008 banks could count on indifference and ignorance to shield them from public anger over misdeeds. But after the bailouts, and the executive compensation battle of 2009, people are hopping mad. We might just make this financial crisis a 2012 election issue yet. A mere four years too late, but who's counting.
The Wall Street Journal wasn't done yet:
“Moebs Services Inc., a research firm in Lake Bluff, Ill., estimates that it costs the giant banks about $350 to $450 per year to maintain a checking account. In contrast, smaller banks incur costs of $175 to $250 a year per checking account.
Banks try to recoup such costs by imposing overdraft fees and other charges. But new rules in the wake of the financial crisis limit some of those surcharges. The recent debit-card-charge mess was a failed attempt to close the gap.”
This is pure banking PR. Why it's so expensive for large banks to maintain customers compared to their local cousins goes unasked. And as Nomi Prins pointed out, it's the dead weight from their acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide that's hurting BofA, not the toothless Dodd-Frank.
As for Brian Moynihan's heartfelt declaration that "We have a right to make a profit"- I believe that's in the Fourth Amendment-let's take a look at Q1 2010, when BofA recorded “better than expected profits.”If you sort through all the crap in there about how spooked investors are about the fact that BofA is still sitting on tons of crap mortgages and can't sell any new ones, you'll find that BofA bested analyst predictions to earn $3.2 billion in Q1 2010.
But I hear you say, what about their ensuing third quarter loss in 2010?
Just as BofA announced its hated debit card fee in September 2011, they also posted this:
“The bank reported third quarter gains of $6.2 billion, compared to a $7.3 billion loss during the same quarter last year.” And again, as Nomi Prins pointed out, they didn't pay taxes in 2010.
Bank Transfer Day might have been spurred by the debit card fee, but its roots go back much farther. It's never been more transparently false that the success of Wall Street will be shared by Main Street. Most media outlets are content to pretend that this realization isn't dawning on the greater public and that banks are acting as a result of punitively constricting regulation, even a modestly successful Bank Transfer Day proves them wrong.
Happy Corporate Approximation of All Hallow’s Eve!
The idea behind Halloween is, not beautiful exactly, but meaningful, useful, and appropriate. In a society as strict as ours- and for all our culture war hand-ringing about the Kardashians and the consumption rates of internet porn, we are a restrictive society- letting people run a little freer lets the cap off all that pent-up steam. Wanton sweets consumption, strange and frightening outfits, and even a little vandalism are all inappropriate, potentially expensive, and completely necessary. I never took part in any Devil's Night activities because, by that time, America's suburban schools were already in a stranger danger panic over razor blades and poisoned candy, and “trick or treat” was an outre and idle threat. But I remember loving the headless horseman as a child and being supremely disappointed when I read the original story and found that Ichabod's vision had a perfectly reasonable, human explanation. Except what is that bit of sabotage against a rival suitor, but a well-executed Devil's Night antic? I've always felt a bit of kinship with this instinct toward meanness and indulging in it feels good, like finding a fruit out of season. This would surprise my coworkers to whom I appear to a Halloween grinch. I completely refused to dress up, or join the company lunch, or judge the costume competition.
There is nothing less in keeping with the meaning and spirit of Halloween than the corporate, sanitized perversion of office drones arriving at work early to prepare their costume. Even those who dressed up in scary costumes – Saw, yawn- don't subvert the order. In my experience, it's only the managers and higher-ups who attempt any horror-themed costumes. If Halloween helps us to acknowledge the chaos of our lives and our insignificance in history, then there's no greater betrayal of it than showing up for work and doing your goddamn job. Oh, how unpredictable to work alongside all these clowns and aliens and fairy princesses! Let's have a party that lasts exactly one hour!
Of course, you can't say anything about this because then you'll be branded a crazy person and HR will start a file, and I don't think I've lived down my suggestion that administrative assistants should unionize (though they should). But I honor Halloween by not participating in the corporate sham. I'm already too much of a coward to quit my job and occupy Wall Street, I don't need to be an outright fraud. Halloween, for me, is not an opportunity to reinforce the corporate culture. Unsurprisingly, the winner of a costume contest dressed up as our product, and sang and danced. The perfect vaudeville imitation of Halloween.
Anyway, it's clear I'm a curmudgeon already, and I fear what the next 40 years will bring. But here's the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from 1949 and narrated by Bing Crosby: