The Anti-Savings Model – Offer 0.1% APY on Savings Accounts and Charge 15% on Credit Cards. A System Designed to Punish Savers and Encourage Extravagant Spending via Usury.
U.S. Banks have a solid incentive, dipped in gold, to keep people in a perpetual state of paying rent on debt while not saving a shiny penny. In fact, their ideal state of financial equilibrium for Americans would be one in which people spent every single penny from their earnings reaching the end of the month like a pauper showing snake eyes in their savings account. This unfortunate banking structure has also been fostered by decades of government banking welfare for an entrenched corporatacracy. Now it is no responsibility of the government or banks on how people choose to manage (or mismanage) their money but when taxpayer money is used to subsidize the banking structure it is important to setup a system that is both fair and beneficial to the overall economy. That should be a minimum requirement. Today’s current system is designed to penalize savings and creates perverse incentives.
The Weakest Bang for our Wilting Dollar – How we Overpaid for the Bailouts and were left with a Wilting Economy Propped up by Government Spending. Paying $446,000 Per Loan Modification and $43,000 for Homes that were already going to be Purchased.
So much horrible policy has occurred since the economy entered recession that the majority of Americans are shell shocked with each day of news. It used to be that a billion dollars in toxic assets was enough to garner some movement out of the market. Now, we talk about trillion dollar deficits as if they were normal. Take for example the ridiculous home buyer tax credit. Let us set aside for a second that massive home buying and speculation led us into this financial crisis in the first place. The home buyer tax credit was basically a gift to people for doing something they were already going to do. Keep in mind that even without the tax credit, people were going to buy homes. But this is what we are left with: Read More
Middle Class Americans Losing Financial Ground on Retirement – As Stock Market Rebounds more Middle Class Americans Have Less Money and Fewer Jobs. How is Health Care Spending Boosting GDP a Good Thing?
As more and more data is released on this Great Recession it is becoming abundantly clear that we have two tracks people are following. On one track where most travel, we have middle class Americans dealing with the highest unemployment in a generation while seeing their net worth dissolve. On the other side of the road, the one lane highway for the tiny percent of the extremely wealthy, we see an extraordinary jump in wealth since the depth of the crisis in March of 2009 when the S&P 500 touched that unholy number of 666. It must seem like a cruel joke that with the stock market being up nearly 70 percent since that low point in 2009, the vast majority of Americans are wondering why they don’t feel much of that rally when they open their wallets. The reality is that most Americans are not invited to this resurgence and in fact, the destruction of the middle class is partly a reason for this stock market rally.
631 Million Credit Cards for 113 Million Households – Credit Card Excess Contracting for First Time in 40 Years. How Plastic Hid Middle Class Financial Decay.
It is estimated that in 2010 we will have 181 million Americans carrying credit cards. Now this is interesting given that Census data from 2008 only shows 113 million households. The credit card is ubiquitous flowing through our economy like a river of easy money. Yet credit cards have become a major pitfall for many consumers. Hidden fees, double-cycle billing, and criminally high interest rates have pushed many Americans into financial tight corners. The credit card as it turns out is a dangerous financial item even if you can have a kitten screened onto the card.