Masters of the Universe category archive

Like Savoir Faire, the touching faith in developer magic is everywhere, even in Queens.

For those of you who have visited New York, how many of you have visited boroughs other than Manhattan?

I have, if you can call having a gig at Sunnyside Yards (which I reached by catching deadheads from Penn Station to the yards), attending a Yankees games (Yankee Stadium is maybe two blocks into the Bronx), or driving through Staten Island and Brooklyn on the way to Amityville (yes, I’ve been to Amityville) “visiting other boroughs.”

Via Atrios.

Empathy schmempathy.

No account accountants.

Thom Hartmann compares the bonus babies with the homeless babies.

After a break of over a month, the FDIC is again remastering the universe.

All gone:

Premier Community Bank of the Emerald Coast, Crestview, Florida

And, for desert . . .

Western National Bank, Phoenix, Arizona

Bloomberg investigates child labor in the Victoria’s Secret supply chain.

Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. “Get up!”

Try reading the whole thing. If you can get all the way through it at the first sitting, please let me know.

Spare the rod, spoil the child, eh, what?

No doubt, it warms the cockles of Newt the Gingrinch’s heart, already two sizes too small, to read of a work ethic’s being inculcated in children.

Aside:

The reporters mention Victoria’s Secret over and over in the story. By the time I was half-way through it, I was thinking, “Get a room already.”

Victoria’s Secret is certainly not alone in not seeing what is before its face. In corporate America, the concept of a “greater good” than bonuses and country club memberships is but a memory.

Margot Ford McMillen explains why Occupy Wall Street sites must be eliminated.

Their existence offends delicate sensibilities.

There’s a major disconnect between the 1% at the top and the 99% at the bottom, and the top dogs don’t want to talk. Instead, they want it to go away. Quietly. And if it doesn’t, they’ll hurt someone.

Buy some pepper spray stock, then click to read the rest.

Atrios explains how credit default swaps work.

The benefits of foreclosures are oft understated. They can create and fund entire departments full of jobs. The Denver Post reports:

Colorado counties for years have sat atop a pile of cash largely generated on the backs of homeowners, banks and businesses plowed over by the state’s foreclosure tidal wave.

The public trustee system has generated huge profits by charging the public more than what’s needed to actually run its offices, according to financial documents provided by several counties and reviewed by The Denver Post.

What’s more, each trustee office has generated so much money that it has a bank account set aside with enough funds to maintain the office for a whole year — salaries included — in the unlikely event that not a single foreclosure gets filed.

More examples of lien largesse at the link.

Depreciation is an economic and accounting concept that allows businesses to spread out the cost of a durable asset, such as a bulldozer, over time for tax and accounting purposes.

Delmarva Power wants to turn it into real money.

Delmarva has installed advanced meters in homes and businesses throughout the vast majority of its Delaware service area.

The meters provide Delmarva with remote access to meters, eliminating the need for readers to physically visit the meters to read them. It also allows the utility to check remotely if a home or business is receiving power, as it did during Hurricane Irene. That means earlier notice of outages.

The installation cost the utility $72 million, and Delmarva reports much of that was offset by savings, such as by no longer using meter readers. In Delmarva’s $31.8 million PSC rate case, the utility said it would only seek $174,000 immediately.

But in the filing, Delmarva also asked the PSC to create a process that would later allow them to recoup what is currently estimated as $39 million associated with the meters, over 15 years.

(snip)

Of Delmarva’s $39 million proposed charge to ratepayers, $26.5 million is to reimburse the company for the lost value of the old meters, which company officials said had not been fully depreciated.

So they upgrade the meters to save money, then want the customers to pay for the old meters because the old meters cost money when they were purchased Lord knows how many years ago and still have a value on paper.

Give them the kewpie doll for creative corporate conniving.

At Asia Times, Ellen Brown wonders why the Fed keeps shoveling money to banksters in the name of “increasing liquidity,” when banks are supposed to lend, not borrow.

She explains that it’s more Wall Street three-card monte. A snippet:

Left unexplained is why the banks’ need for “liquidity” justifies such extraordinary measures. Why do banks need cheap and ready access to funds? Aren’t they the lenders rather than the borrowers of funds? Don’t they simply take in deposits and lend them out?

The answer is no. Today when banks make loans, they extend credit first, then fund the loans by borrowing from the cheapest available source. [4] If deposits are not available, they borrow from another bank, the money market, or the Federal Reserve.

Rather than loans being created from deposits, loans actually create deposits. They create deposits when checks are drawn on the borrower’s account and deposited in another bank. The originating bank can then borrow these funds (or others created by the same process at another bank) at the Fed funds rate – currently a very low 0.25%. In effect, a bank can create money in the form of “bank credit”, lend it to a customer at high interest, and borrow it back at very low interest, pocketing the difference as its profit.

If all this looks like sleight of hand, it is. The process has been compared to “check kiting,” . . . .

Read the whole thing.

Then invest your money in a slot machine in Lost Wages, Nevada; at least those games are regulated.

Raiding employee pensions:

. . . firms now employ Chapter 11 not to protect themselves against creditors but for strategic purposes.

One of the most popular ploys is to use the bankruptcy court to undermine the bargaining position of labor unions. The latest firm to do so is American Airlines, which said it took the step to “achieve industry competitiveness.” This is corporate-speak for “we’re going to milk our employees dry.”

Full story at the link.

The harsh truth is that the real estate bubble was a bubble.

It’s popped, not deflated. And it’s not coming back.

As home prices across the region continue to fall, situations like Perry’s have become increasingly common. A report released Tuesday found that more than a quarter of Hampton Roads homes with mortgages – 25.2 percent – are worth less than what is owed on the loans.

The number of local homeowners who were “underwater” on their loans rose 1 percent to 84,443 from June to September, according to CoreLogic, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based company that tracks mortgages nationwide.

For homeowners who aren’t in jeopardy of falling behind on payments, being underwater means they are tied to their homes – unable to sell without paying their lender the difference or negotiating a short sale.

Like the Tulip Bubble, all gone. The banksters are left with the money, having been made whole for their venality business “missteps” by the Fed; and the homeowners, left with wilted tulips.

Bombing far-away lands with strange-sounding names may be an effective distraction, but it ain’t fixing anything.

Selfishness has side-effects.

From the website:

Keith and Pat Garofalo, economic policy editor for ThinkProgress.org, discuss the latest report from the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, revealing that 10 of the top U.S. lenders may have illegally foreclosed on up to 5,000 active duty service members.

The shortfall in MF Global Inc.’s U.S. segregated customer accounts may exceed $1.2 billion, more than double what was previously expected, said the trustee overseeing a liquidation of the failed brokerage.

That would mean customer accounts are missing about 22 percent of their total of $5.4 billion. A shortfall of 11 percent had been previously estimated by a person with knowledge of probes into the firm’s collapse. James Giddens, the trustee, said yesterday that forensic accountants and investigators are working “around the clock,” and the estimate may change.

Know, grasshopper, that, behind that curtain, they have no idea what they are doing.

They know only that someone else will be left holding the bag.

Two more banks disappeared from view yesterday.

Central Progressive Bank, Lacombe, Louisiana

Polk County Bank, Johnston, Iowa

Click for a larger image.

Via BartBlog.

Bill Shein surveys the new fees banks are considering instituting to replace the old fees that they are now prohibited from collecting.

Here’s a sample. Follow the link to see the rest.

Costo Beneficio de Mejora – Thanks to online translation tools available even to newspaper columnists, it’s easy for banks to hide fees by printing them in a foreign language. So if you see a $2.32 monthly charge for “Costo Beneficio de Mejora,” know that you’ve been charged an unnecessary “Profit Enhancement Fee.”</blockquote>

November 18, 2011 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Masters of the Universe | Bookmark this post