Pat Oliphant for October 21, 2010

What? No hate for the banks?

I certainly have a love-hate relationship with my bank which I won’t name but it rhymes with Mel’s Pargo.

Damn, the spam is getting bad in here! Almost as bad as the treatment at the bank, yuk yuk yuk…

So what’s worse: slews of banks that have failed, grinding the flow of capital to a halt, or slews of banks that have returned to solvency because of taxpayer bailouts but now won’t lend, grinding the flow of capital to a halt?

^ Why do you hate America?! Trickle down is proven economics! *

Another name for Chase Morgan Bank!

Reading through the comments I find It interesting that sarcasm is difficult to detect in one liners delivered in the ethernet. I think it would be helpful if people would just say what they mean. Tongue in cheek comments tend to be misread and confusing. At the end of a long running commentary I sometimes can’t tell who’s on what side of the issue. Jades comment is one example. I’m almost certain that she is being facetious, but not 100% and when that’s combined with ten other unclear positions in one commentary I lose the thread. Just saying….

Having said that… I think it would be interesting if the anger on the right (tea party) and the left (democrats) were somehow able to join together and target the real enemy…Wall street! Folks…these bastards have to be put in their place or we’re finished!

Some banks, I’ve read, are re-instituting monthly checking account fees because their ability to make millions off of outrageous (sometimes) hidden fees has been reduced. No more “oh, you withdrew your account by 80 cents, that will cost you $39 for that one-day float.”

One of the most egregious stories was an account in a documentary about a woman who had made a mistake and went over her credit card limit by a very small amount. Something like $20. When she made the mistake, the bank charged two different $39 fees, increased her interest rate by almost double, then added another fee for being even more over the limit. A couple of months later, she was laid off in the worst of the recession and that made it difficult, obviously, to catch up. She couldn’t and didn’t add any more debt to the card (being over the limit) but it took a while for her to pay it off.

She began with a credit card debt of $480 and it eventually cost her $3,200 to pay it all off because of a series of fees and higher interest rates. The difference was all fees and interest.

now I can see I’m on the bankers side. BUT don’t worry the government will step in and make fund bad loans.

Did you know that the bible forbids taking interest on a loan?

^^ sheesh i give up. You can quote the laws and regulations, report the actual factual history, report what actually happened and people will say things like “the government will step in and make fund bad loans.”

It is utterly untrue, but, clearly, truth no longer matters.

@Tom - I have made it a practice to mark all of my facetious statements with asterisks (*) for that very reason.

@cdward - This is a Judeo-Christian society built on the morals of the Bible and since interest is a fundamental principle of our economy I would say you obviously must be wrong, just like how being rich isn’t seen as detrimental to one’s ability to enter into Heaven. You need look no further than gays and abortion as the sole causes of moral decay in our country. *

^ Thanks for the * tip. When I send emails using material from The Onion, Andy Borowitz, or Cracked dot com I have to carefully say THIS IS SATIRE or I get all kinds of crazy emails back.

yup. lotsa folks (evident above) just don´t get it: itś a cartoon!

We’re all primates here on this bus… A Choice Visa card my wife and I had had for, no foolin’, over 20 years, which had had a credit limit of something like $10,000, was suddenly cut to $200 (and percent raised, of course) because she was late on one (1) bill by a few days. She paid, called them, and got a runaround. She was told that there was nothing they could do, which was of course a lie – it’s all just “policy,” and policy is how they changed the fees up and limit down in the first place! She demanded a supervisor, registered a formal complaint as a long-time customer (it had been our primary credit card for decades, so they had made a ton of money off us), paid off our card 100%, and informed them that she was destroying it and would never get another. They begged her to stay, but gave her zero (0) reason to do so other than the goodness of her heart, because they did not change one d@mn thing. We no longer have that card, and she started telling other people. My wife is formidable…but we are fortunate that this was not a big deal for us. Other people depend on cards more than we do.

^ thanks fennec. I gotta stop trying sometimes and back off

senor, how on earth did you manage to move backward on the evolutionary scale?

motive, that’s incredible. You’d think with your family’s long history they’d have made an exception. Bravo for your wife for sticking to her principles. Taking your business elsewhere is the only message the fluckers ever hear!

Amazing isn’t it, how, with your story, after 20 years you miss one payment by a few days and they bring your credit limit down to near zero, but a lender sold a $775,000 home to an Hispanic strawberry field worker who didn’t have bad credit, but he had almost no credit history. Voila, he qualified for a home. (This story is in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” which I highly recommend.)

I don’t use any credit cards anymore. I have an account with my bank (i don’t remember what the type of account is called) that is considered the same thing as a credit card, but I’ve never used it.

^ You are off your meds.

I’m still testing to see which urls work and which are too long Onion satire: Then go to bottom left where it says “more American voices…..

http://www.theonion.com/articles/candidate-unaware-constitution-provides-for-separa,18305/

I’m not afraid to use a name. US Bank tried to charge my son $437.00 in fees for an $ 0.87 overage on his account due to an ATM fee while he was out of the country and unable to respond. Even after paying the initial $31.00 over-draft fee, US Bank would not let us close his account because of the other daily fees that they had piled on. When we flat out told them to shove it, that we would not pay their blackmail, they black-listed our son, and he couldn’t open an account with any other bank.

You’re right. The immoral bankers must be stopped. How many billion$ is enough?

^ That’s awful. The days of banks or credit card cos working with their customers are so long gone.

I have a friend who lost her job and called her bank, told them what happened, asked if she could make arrangements to pay a smaller monthly amount until she found a new job, and their response was to double her interest rate immediately. She was trying to be responsible and cooperative and they said f### off.

glad i don’t have any credit cards

Jade: Trickle down economics works, but what does it produce? If you feed a horse enough oats, you won’t get more oats, just road hockey pucks.

tcl, the commercial banks seem all about equally bad. It is as if they collude to keep crappy customer service.

The people that hit overdraft fees most often have litte to offer the bank in profit potential. They would forgive a customer with, say, a quarter million investment account who made an error with his checking.

Credit union is the best way to go.