banking

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This past weekend was spent semi-unplugged.  Heck I didn’t know that Miami had beaten UNC for the ACC Basketball Tournament title until late last night!  Since all that mess was happening in Greensboro I drove a hunnerd miles the opposite direction on 220 to do ballroom dancing and general geek-ery with my girlfriend.

But even so, I have been following the mess in Cyprus, where the government is poisoned to confiscate 10% of everyone’s bank accounts in an attempt to get bailed out of the monetary mess of its own manufacture.  So much commentary could be made of this: the failure of socialism, the complete failure of the Eurozone as anything remotely a feasible concept, the failure of policies that can only lead to hyper-inflation, the failure to rein-in the “banksters” (i.e. those who see banking as not a sacred trust but an exploitable resource), the failure to hold those ...

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I don’t get it: why don’t those Icelanders take on the extra $3.5 billion in debt that would have been incurred by their politicians bailing out the British and Dutch for the failure of Landsbanki, by borrowing more money and creating massive inflation of the currency?

I mean, that’s what we do here in the United States, ain’t it?!

Seriously though: nice to see some fiscal sanity in this world. Maybe our Icelandic friends could consider exporting some of that here.

Mash down here for more of the story. Worth keeping an eye on as no doubt the European Community is going to be looking to retaliate against Iceland for its gumption....

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According to the Tax Justice Network based out of Great Britain, the most secretive financial jurisdiction on Earth is actually… the state of Delaware.

Yeah, that Delaware: on the eastern seaboard of these United States! $2.6 trillion was deposited in this country by non-resident citizens and corporations in 2007, with Delaware leading the way…

The survey of laws, practices and size of inflows in 60 jurisdictions found Delaware coming in first, followed by Luxembourg and then Switzerland. The Cayman Islands and the United Kingdom round out the top five.

“While the U.S. has been jumping up and down and saying ‘Aha, bad, wicked Swiss banks,’ the U.S. is doing exactly the same things as far as non-resident bank account holders,” said Sarah Lewis, executive director of the group, based in the U.K.

Switzerland has been the poster child for financial secrecy over the past year. The United State sued Swiss

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That’s what John Kanas of BankUnited is now saying. Kanas believes that a thousand banks – mostly small, privately-run institutions – will go belly-up during the next two years.

Ordinarily I’m automatically inclined to disregard this kind of statement as extreme alarmism (like how I never take any “climate experts” from the United Nations seriously). But given the number of banks and more than a few of those being larger ones that have gone down in just the past year, I do have to think this is something that merits serious credence.

But hey: if worse comes to worst, I guess the Federal Reserve only has to inject another five trillion dollars or so into the economy and thinks will be fixed. Right? Right?!?...

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Josh Muszynski of Manchester, New Hampshire went to the local convenience store and bought a pack of Camel cigarettes. He put the purchase on his debit card. And then when he got home found out that he had been charged more than TWENTY THREE QUADRILLION DOLLARS for his smokes.

Turns out to have been a programming error on the part of Visa, and apparently it’s hit a number of its cardholders. Visa and his bank quickly resolved the issue for Muszynski, and he was no longer stuck with a tab that was more than 2007 times the current national debt.

But hey, as bad as inflation is getting, it’s just a matter of time before all our purchases are this astronomical! 😛...

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“Gloom, despair, and agony on me.
Deep dark depression, excessive misery.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – the government agency which makes sure that the money you keep in the bank will still be there if the firm goes bust – is running out of money for its fund and risks insolvency, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has told bank CEOs. A lot of banks have gone under in the past several months and its depleted the FDIC’s coffers.

The FDIC is now looking to shore up the fund with new banking fees, and is projected to raise $27 billion.

Will that be enough at all to keep scenes from yesteryear like the one depicted above from happening again?

In my opinion: not likely....

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Lately it seems like the “feel good” stories have become even more few and far between. So when one is found, I feel more than a little compelled to give it a shout-out.

Take, f’rinstance, what Leonard Abess Jr. did. Back in November he sold a majority share of his holdings in Miami-based City National Bancshares.

And then, Abess gave away $60 million of the profits to EVERYONE that was on his bank’s payroll. He even went so far as to find 72 former employees so that he could give them a share of the money, too. More than 400 people got the “bonuses”, and depending on how long they had been employed some got more than $100,000

This is an awesome story of capitalism and corporate responsibility, folks. And when I say “responsibility”, what I mean by that is a company or business owner going above and beyond ...

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Read the story here.

This is, by an order of some magnitude, a much more important story than McCain versus Obama right now.

It’s also one of the reasons why I don’t believe it really matters which candidate or party wins in the November elections. If Obama wins, he’s going to immediately face a ruined economy the likes of which have not been seen since the Depression and if he stays true to the policies he’s running on, he’ll likely make the situation that much worse. If McCain wins, the state of America’s finances is going to be an automatic indictment against not just him and Palin but on the previous eight years of the Bush Administration.

Oh yeah, and another bank – this time it’s Silver State in Nevada, with $2 billion in assets – failed today. That’s the 11th big bank this year to go under. ...

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A major American bank is not just teetering perilously close to failing, “it’s unavoidable”, a source has told The Knight Shift.

Details about the possible imminent failure first came this way a little over two weeks ago, and I’ve been doing a lot of calling and checking around since then. The individual who first told me has been a longtime (over ten years) source whose information has previously turned out to be exceptionally reliable. And all the evidence that I’ve been gathering over the past few weeks jibes bigtime bad with what the source has been saying.

For various reasons I’m not able to divulge the name of the bank. But this blog can report the following details:

– The bank in question is one of the top five financial institutions in the United States.

– The bank has posted a high profit loss but this is “not even close”

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