Too big to fail? Try big enough to fail us!

I promise, I'll get to the suggested topics soon but I am fuming once again with the banking industry.

I was rather happy with the service I got at my Washington Mutual branch even though that's where the whole problem started. I was even happier with the nice people at my local NatWest before they sold to Fleet and then Fleet sold to Bank of America but that is ancient history.

Do you get the feeling that there will only be 5 banks in this country soon?

Anyway, last summer Chase decided to charge me overdraft fees on a debit card and I blogged about this last year. I did not know there was overdraft "protection" on the card where they would honor my 5 dollar Starbucks purchase and charge me 32 dollars for the privilege. When I learned of that, they said they could take the overdraft protection off.

Off course, they did not and fees started to rack up again.

It has been many months and I finally got in touch with the regional manager. It was like talking to a recording - we do care about our customers, we cannot refund fees, we now let you opt out of overdraft protection. What a drone. I then told her that I made a specific feature request and they gave me the wrong one. They should have said I would be better off with a credit card as it would have worked exactly the same as a debit card with overdraft. Only with no fees.

Then I hit her with a real bit of thinking. I would take my business elsewhere unless she refunded the fees. I did not tell her I would compromise and split it with her but I would have done so.

No leg to stand on, you say? Here is where someone who actually had responsibility for business, not just keeping order, would come in.

I am not a giant fish but I do pay them interest on a mortgage. There are other legit fees but let's keep it simple. I pay them $600 per month in interest and I am asking for a $300 fee refund. Think about this for a second. In order to keep a month after month stream of $600 they would have to give up $300 one time.

Expand it out - $600 times 12 months is $7200. And I have had this thing for over four years with the intention of keeping it for several more years.

So, by not refunding fees that never should have been charged in the first place (because they basically lied about the card features, intentionally or unemotionally), they would have a nice revenue stream for several years. I have one more level in the company to try but I have already started to shop around.

Which brings me to Capital One. Granted, nobody has a branch on every corner like Chase. Not even Starbucks can match that in this part of the world. But Capital One has four within reasonable distance from my house and office so it would be fine.

I walk in and the very lovely (personality) bank officer starts telling me about rewards programs and .05% interest rates. She did not know squat about their mortgages and was not too swift on the website, either. While I wait for a mortgage person to get back to me, I left the branch shaking my head.

What a Dumas! (Remember that TV commercial? Change the syllable accent).

Does any bank have people who know what they are doing? I said, show me a competitive mortgage rate to Chase and I move business checking and credit card, personal checking and savings plus two more credit cards over to them.

"Here, let me tell you about how many miles you earn when you write checks."

Too big to fail? Too big to give a crap.

I have to get a bigger mattress.

Et tu Brutus?

I got this in the email this morning:

"TrimTabs Investment Research reporting their latest real-time economic data shows US economy is on the road to recovery and attributing the economic rebound mostly to low interest rates and government stimulus."

Really? You guys wrote this in the beginning of February:

"TrimTabs using real-time numbers estimates that job losses for January were 105,000, much higher than Wall Street expectations that the BLS on Friday will report 5,000 January job losses. TrimTabs warns the BLS estimates are highly inaccurate because of incomplete survey data and illogical seasonal adjustments, among other things. Which means government policy, business and investment decisions based on these numbers are useless, and in fact, dangerous."

Here is the blog post for that - Trim Tabs Expects Bomb

The technicals are lousy but the fundamentals are worse. One month, the government is dangerous and the next they get all the credit for the recovery.

All that matters is the specter of lifting the stimulus and that was not covered in the CMT exam.

Today's data

I still want to hear from readers about topics to cover (see previous post) but this one caught my eye. To wit (or twit):

The U.S. trade deficit narrowed to $37.29 billion in January, the Commerce Department said. A 1.7% decline in imports outpaced a 0.3% drop in exports as the volume of oil imports hit its lowest level in more than a decade.

There is something perverted and innately evil in this report. The trade gap narrowing is a good thing when you are a debtor nation but look how it was done. Imports fell more than exports! Oh, I am all warm and fuzzy now.

When exports actually start to rise, we can talk. This report tells us the economy is still shrinking.

What do you want to talk about?

I do this blog almost every market day and given the stock market's lack of movement this week I am out of stuff to say. What is the most important market related topic for you?

A follow up to "too bullish"

We've had a lot of discussion in Quick Takes Pro about the low volume rally and even it if is indeed low volume. We found this on the blogosphere so read it with a grain of salt. There is an element of conspiracy in there.
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Furthermore, if anyone was merely looking at the trading action in regular hours, one would think there was absolutely no profit made since early September. The reason for that: all the upside since September 14th has come exclusively from afterhours action.

Every single day, minimal volume pushes the futures index higher. Good news, bad news, it don’t matter to the Goldman S&P and Russell 1000 futures desk: they just lift every micro offer, giving the impression that the market is unstoppable, often leapfrogging each other as the latest viagra’ed GDP or unemployment rumor is spread.

Come morning, it is time for the HFT (high frequency trading) brigade to come in and scalp their
trillions of pennies while leaving the market unchanged, then at 4pm handing it off again to leveraged futures manipulation and dark pools. In a nutshell, this is the secret of the past quarter’s phenomenal market performance.

- Peter Cooper, financial journalist

too bullish

The headline here is intentionally lower case as in a whisper. I am tired of finding bearish evidence in the face of a market that just goes up no matter what. But here goes. I found this at the Pragmatic Capitalist site.

As charts below from the ICI illustrates, portfolio managers have been so nervous to miss any up-moves that they have run down their cash holdings to 3.6% of assets from nearly 6% a year ago — the largest decline in 19 years. Equity cash ratios are back to where they were in September 2007, just as the stock market was hitting its peak.

My own retirement account is half cash.

A true solution to the banking crisis

From Non-Sequiter by Wiley Miller.

http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=15ff7fffd1b2be0eb0bceff4b69175e5

I'd like to jusst link the picture in here but it is not exactly ethical or even legal.