"Comedy Nation This Week" - May 18, 2012

Here's today's podcast with me, Laurie Buckley, Dave Plunkett and host Bill Bronner:

Panelists discuss the Facebook IPO, census demographics, Greece, Spain and more.

Trippitorial - Robbing Banks

The real profit to be made in robbing banks is if you’re the bank doing the robbing. As soon as you give a bank your money, they create fees so they don’t have to give it back. So if you deposit five dollars, they’ll create a five dollar fee for only having five dollars. They’ll call it a “low amount” fee. You should have had six. Of course, then it would be a six dollar fee. This is a good system…if you’re a bank.

When I was a kid, banks used to give you toasters to open an account. They wanted your business.  They treated their customers like customers. Of course, there was more regulation and more competition. With all the bank mergers going on, soon there will just be the Fed and one big commercial bank with an investing subsidiary left standing, neither of which our government will control.

Nowadays banks treat their customers like a teat to be milked. They are to be raped and pillaged. Customers are something banks tolerate. Customers are to be exploited. If they’re dumb enough to pay one fee, maybe they’ll pay two. And meanwhile, the bank will be gambling with your money.

Every time I go into a bank, I expect the teller to produce a gun and say, “Stick ‘em up!” They charge interest rates larger than Louie the loan shark and break you if you fail to repay in ways that Louie can only dream about. There are no usury laws. Who needs ‘em?

Bank lobbyists have managed to re-legislate most of the 1933 banking act, except for FDIC insurance. They like that. After all, if they’re going to gamble with depositor’s money, somebody has to pay for it.

Now JP Morgan Chase is on their way to losing 2.5, maybe 3 billion dollars. They call it hedging because if they called it what it really was, it would be illegal. If only we’d let them regulate themselves. They wouldn’t break any more laws because there wouldn’t be any.