Hell, Scylla, I didn’t know diddly. My old man knew ten, twenty times more than I did, and he couldn’t figure out how they were going to offload the crap. Well, now we know. They sliced it and diced it, and chopped it up into creative investment opportunity! And then the exact same people who sold the securities sold insurance against them going bad. The securities they sold. Going bad. Which was a safe bet, no matter how leveraged it was, because the housing market would never go down!
(Way back when, didn’t you say something about hearing how some investment houses were leveraged at thirty to one, and you thought that kinda risky? In my
pristine ignorance, I said I thought it wasn’t risky, but insane! But what do I know…?)
I am a very smart guy, Scylla, and do not suffer from any false modesty, or any modesty whatsoever, for that matter. I have never had a credit card. I don’t know my credit rating, probably something like “Hold as hostage”. Live in a double wide, paid ten grand cash for it ten years ago, and long as there are no radical shortages in the duck tape market, I’m cool. I arrived naked, will leave dead, and love is the only thing I ever had worth worrying about.
Hey shoving a cactus right up the economy’s ass is very descriptive what those banks did. The very personal, and very prickly resulting feeling remains for those struggling.
But don’t you see, the High Financier thinks it was RUDE and UNCALLED FOR and CHILDISH.
Certainly more childish than pretending you can just imagine securities into existence and pluck never-ending streams of money from them. No, wishful thinking, greed, and fraud are all right and proper, it’s insults we can’t have!
I just got a letter in the mail from Bank of America. Due to a potential security breach that may or may not have affected my card, they’re going to cancel my card and issue a new one to me.
First, if there’s a security breach with my card, why would you not cancel it immediately? If there isn’t one, why bother with this?
Second, this is the second fucking time in a year that they’ve had to do this. What the fucking fuck, Bank of America?
This likely isn’t their fault. What happens is, somebody like JcPenney’s has their records compromised by a hacker. They are obligated to report the security breach to Visa. Visa than looks at the entire record of cards that were in the exposed database, and notifies the issuer of the compromise.
Resurrecting this thread to say that my bank, SunTrust, also just instituted a $5 fee for debit cards. And what’s worse, there is a $7 fee in addition ($12 a month for a bare bones checking account?! Are you shitting me?!) unless you have direct deposit or a daily minimum balance of $500. Fuck that, they just lost a customer.
Too late, we’re already moving to the local credit union. We didn’t enjoy the threat of having to pay out monthly service fees. Our banking needs are simple and the local Credit Union more than meets those needs.
I had a strong feeling that they might reverse their decision, glad they did. I guess I’ll stay with them a little while longer. I like their online services and phone app and such, and I know I wouldn’t get that with a CU, at least not the same level of service.
I guess we just got lucky. The CU we’re moving to has online banking and an iPhone app. I hear USAA has the same (we almost went with them until we ran into domestic partnership weirdness).
But… I understand what a pain it is to move, and had we not already started the process, we’d probably stay with BofA too. Mainly out of pure laziness.