January 6, 2010Jon Brooks
From The Big Picture blog, a post called Banking Sector Remains (literally) unchanged:
Ever wonder why the banking sector continues to operate as it always has?
Here’s a possible answer: According to a report on Corporate Governance by Professor Emma Coleman Jordan of the Georgetown University Law Center…one simple issue might help to explain why change has been so elusive at the bailed out banks: Their people.
Jordan notes that the folks who run the major banks today — the senior executives, directors, managers, etc. — are essentially the same exact folks who ran them (into the ground) 5 and 10 years ago:
“The prospects for a robust prudently guided financial sector have been substantially clouded by the fact that the both the corporate governance structure and the executive leadership of the financial sector remain largely unchanged—92% of the management and directors of the top 17 recipients of TARP funds are still in office.”
You read that correctly — 92% of the TARP recipients’ senior management remains essentially unchanged post-crisis . . .
January 6, 2010Jon Brooks
Gas prices are higher than any time since 2008, so a site like GasBuddy.com might be especially useful right about now. The site works by members of the public spotting gas prices and posting them. Points earned towards prizes like free gas — plus the altruism of helping your fellow driver and sticking it to The Man — serve as reporting incentives.
To find the lowest prices in your area, just type in your zip code and a list of gas stations with the lowest-reported prices in the last 36 hours appears. This represents potentially serious savings — in my city, the site shows a 50 cents per gallon differential between the lowest and highest prices.
The site also includes a trip cost calculator and a blog at which you can monitor pricing trends. Yesterday’s post:
For those of you who haven’t filled up lately, I suggest you do it sooner rather than later to take advantage of lower prices that are slowly evaporating… (P)rices will continue to rise, some places may rise a few pennies a day, some might see double digit gains. We’ll likely see the “$3″ sign come back out in more areas of California and the West Coast, with Gulf States closer to $2.60-$2.75.
So fill ‘er up…
January 6, 2010Jon Brooks
Hear about this one? Complaint choirs.
Apparently, they’ve been around a few years, but if you ask me, the concept is the ultimate Internet meme for our current plight: Groups of people getting together to sing (quite well, actually) a litany of things that irritate them.
Naturally, economic issues figure in. In Juneau, they grouse that “Blue Cross is stealing my life — I’m a wage slave for health care,” and also mention high rents, rich people, and cronyism in state hiring. In Chicago, they sing: “My damn boss outsourced my job but he gets to keep his” and “I am drowning in student loans.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. In Philadelphia, the lamentations include parking signs, customer call menu options, infrequent sex, umbrellas, and — most notably — New Jersey drivers. In Chicago, they kvetch:
Busses bunch up worse than granny panties
Nobody ever throws the ball to me
Airport security took my mouthwash
Everybody thinks they are a good kisser
The amateur Jethro Tull cover band
Only tourists like deep dish pizza
Everybody is a moron
It’s a sort of more sophisticated version of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
For those who believe in the power of positive thinking, well, your day may yet come. It’s just that nobody knows when…
January 6, 2010Jon Brooks
The site Being Frugal.net has a feature called Tightwad Tuesdays with some interesting tricks for saving money on cleaning around the house:
There’s also a post from today called 101 Ways to Cut Your Spending This Year. Suggestions include line drying your clothes, unplugging your electronics at night, catching rainwater for use in your garden, giving up cold cereal for oatmeal, making your own baby food, and doing your own taxes.
Then there’s this idea: Start shopping for next Christmas now.
God, no.
January 5, 2010Jon Brooks
There’s a school of thought out there that holds that the policies of the Fed and the Treasury, while perhaps preventing a full-blown economic depression, are sooner or later going to lead to massive inflation.
Even if that’s true, one would hope the situation won’t spin as out of control as it has in hyperinflationary Zimbabwe. Take, for instance, the country’s $100 Trillion bank note, which it introduced about a year ago.
The bill is available for purchase for $7.99 (or about $25 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, give or take a few trillion) from Capitalistpig Asset Management.
January 5, 2010Jon Brooks
This recent article in the New York Times details the likely rise in customer cable bills that will result from the various battles over subscriber fees going on between content providers and cable companies (the just-settled News Corp.-Time Warner Cable dispute, for instance).
The last thing anyone needs these days is to pay more per “SpongeBob SquarePants” episode. But what can ya do? Go without “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”? Unlikely. So they have us by the proverbial short hairs.
Unless…you ask them for a lower rate. That’s right. Perhaps you don’t know that just as you can do with credit card rates, you can get your TV bill reduced by playing a little poker with the provider. There are many blogs and web sites out there that outline the process:
Ask and Save On Your Cable Bill (Free From Broke)
My wife was getting sick of the cable bill…Whoa! I gotta admit, I’m an addict…but I also understand that we’re spending way too much money for the privilege of watching a ton of commercials on shows we mostly don’t care about. I told my wife to let me take a shot at calling the cable company to see what they can do for us.
So I grabbed our latest bill, a pen and gave them a call. I got a friendly woman who asked how she can help me. I asked her what can be done to lower the bill as the rates have gotten real high and we were ready to drop cable… Immediately she said they had a 12 month promotion (and) just like that we saved roughly $25 a month on our cable! I took the person’s name and company number in case any issues arise on the next bill….
Continue Reading
January 5, 2010Jon Brooks
YouTube’s a strange place…
January 5, 2010Jon Brooks
It’s a different type of “bail-out.”
The Huffington Post and friends are spearheading a nascent movement to move your money from the big financial giants to community banks. From a column by Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson:
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks — JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
Meanwhile, America’s Main Street community banks — the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of — are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.
A web site has been set up called Move Your Money, at which you can type in your zip code to locate a community bank near you. The Huffington Post has a page at which you can submit your experience with local banking, and an interactive map that allows you to drill down to your own area to find what people are saying about the small banks in your neighborhood.
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January 4, 2010Jon Brooks
Fark.com is a “news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership, from which we hand-pick the funny and weird notable news — and not-news — of the day.”
The article headlines are re-written in a cheeky and/or satirical style. The site’s headline of the year contest, in which users picked the top 20, yielded one related to the economy: The article, from UPI, was titled “From fired to fire, bad day for Oregon man,” about a guy who’d been fired at work then came home to find his house on fire. The re-worked headline:
Man gets called into work so he can be fired, returns home to find his house on fire. Wishes he had been laid off.
Took me about five minutes to get that one.
And from 2008′s contest:
Cops looking for fake Target clerk who stole 17 grand in iPods. Store managers realized he wasn’t a real clerk when he actually helped customers
Just fyi…
