Canadian Banking - Non-Scandal ?

[Topaz]

MY late hubby had very good credit rating and the bank increased our VISA to 17,000.00, so we asked to reduce it to a much lower #.

[taxme]

On 3/20/2017 at 4:43 AM, Michael Hardner said:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/banks-sales-tactics-call-centres-go-public-1.4030981

Try as I might I can't see a scandal in this story:

Banks are well within their rights to sell products, aren't they ?  And the story includes items like this:

I feel that this story is just piggybacking on the (valid) Wells-Fargo scandal in the US.  Of course there are abusive managers in these organizations, but isn't that to be expected in a huge organization ?

I fear that CBC is pushing these stories to try to be relevant and the banks are an easy target.  

Maybe if employees were unionized this problem would not exist at all. But of course the banks would fight tooth and nail just to make sure that this could not happen. Banksters? What a wonderful gang of fellow human beings. Always there ready and willing to take your money.

Edited April 2, 2017 by taxme

[Moonlight Graham]

I wish I owned a bank.  By far the greatest business idea of all-time.  Millions of people willingly lend you gobs and gobs of money for free or next to nothing, then you turn around and invest that money.  Sometimes you even charge people a monthly fee to let them lend you their money!  Oh, and then you limit the # of times per month they can take out their own money!  And then put monthly minimum balances people have to have in their accounts to ensure you always have lots of free money to invest.

 Most store fronts are places where businesses sell people goods.  But banks have store fronts so people can come inside and lend them money for free!  Brilliant!

[dre]

On 4/4/2017 at 10:33 PM, Moonlight Graham said:

I wish I owned a bank.  By far the greatest business idea of all-time.  Millions of people willingly lend you gobs and gobs of money for free or next to nothing, then you turn around and invest that money.  Sometimes you even charge people a monthly fee to let them lend you their money!  Oh, and then you limit the # of times per month they can take out their own money!  And then put monthly minimum balances people have to have in their accounts to ensure you always have lots of free money to invest.

 Most store fronts are places where businesses sell people goods.  But banks have store fronts so people can come inside and lend them money for free!  Brilliant!

Its even better than that. You can flat out make money that never existed before and lend that out.

[SpankyMcFarland]

Just dealt with BMO on a will and I found them far more difficult to manage than the lawyers or the courts which were surprisingly efficient. They were constantly trying to sell me stuff I didn't want and were as awkward as possible over the accounts. 

[cannuck]

In my youth, I took a year off of school to become a banker (close to home for family reasons).  As a management trainee, I was shoved along at quite a pace, but remember oh so well being clearly told how to sell debt to farm clients.  This was in a period of high inflation.  Past the level of authority I had at the counter, we were instructed to hustle the sucker...er CUSTOMER...into a meeting with our ag reps.  Decades later, I did a lot of work with a group who investigated illegal farm foreclosures, that both the banks and courts were all too willing to execute.  I also traveled with a committee of MLAs on a "farm debt tour".  Turns out, when we sent them into the ag guys, they were convincing many to incorporate, thus avoiding the whole property coming under the "Homesteader's Act" (sic?) that would have protected some properties from foreclosure.  Instead, the landowner got protected for the home quarter and the bank walked away with the land - just as they had planned decades earlier.  That, and the games played such as "can't finance that used piece of equipment, but we CAN write a new one (unsaid, or sometimes openly suggested - from the dealer down the road we finance).  I could literally write a book on the games that were played, so this is no surprise at all to me.

Banks are NOT the same as any other business.   They exist and enjoy the ability to do what they do with our money based on their charter and a web of legislation and regulation that grants them certain privileges that are available to no other business.  The lessons about how treacherous the world of finance could be was forgotten in the years since 1929,  What SHOULD have happened in 2008/9 is that banking should have been cleaned up by realizing that over the years, they have managed to boondoggle the politicians and idiotic bureaucrats into letting them do more and more things that are a blatant conflict of interest. The Yanks REALLY screwed up by rewarding them for their treachery with literally TRILLIONS, ultimately at the expense of the taxpayer (too long a story for here).  We didn't miss by that much, banks here are now able to sell insurance, be investment banks and depository institution.  Just like the US.  Worse yet, they have literally transformed our economy from being based on productivity and creation of wealth to nothing more than redistributing wealth by speculative shell games.  THey have betrayed our trust in the most egregious of ways.

[bush_cheney2004]

6 minutes ago, cannuck said:

... The Yanks REALLY screwed up by rewarding them for their treachery with literally TRILLIONS, ultimately at the expense of the taxpayer (too long a story for here).  We didn't miss by that much, banks here are now able to sell insurance, be investment banks and depository institution.  Just like the US.  Worse yet, they have literally transformed our economy from being based on productivity and creation of wealth to nothing more than redistributing wealth by speculative shell games.  THey have betrayed our trust in the most egregious of ways.

 

No they didn't, and comparisons to Canada are superficial at best.  Canada's lack of productivity goes way back to domestic choices and limited domestic capital, with a very high reliance on foreign investment and ownership.

American taxpayers actually made money from the 2008 "crisis" according to this guy....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bailout-highly-profitable-for-taxpayers-when-you-look-at-the-right-numbers/2015/01/01/dc2a05a6-8fa5-11e4-a412-4b735edc7175_story.html?utm_term=.bd15c657656d

[cannuck]

8 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

No they didn't, and comparisons to Canada are superficial at best.  Canada's lack of productivity goes way back to domestic choices and limited domestic capital, with a very high reliance on foreign investment and ownership.

American taxpayers actually made money from the 2008 "crisis" according to this guy....

That guy is simply spouting the same line of absolute BS that banksters have perfected.

"Now we come to the big and nonobvious number: the excess profit that the Federal Reserve has made from the bailout, and given to Treasury. The Fed has added trillions of dollars of securities to its balance sheet as part of its various programs to put cash into the world financial system and hold down interest rates to help the economy. The Fed did this by creating money out of thin air and using it to buy interest-bearing securities. That interest is pure profit to the Fed — and the Fed, by law, turns over its surplus profit to Treasury."

This money that the Fed "created out of thin air" is ultimately a liability to the taxpayer.  Not only that, but it is a massive pent-up inflationary force.   Expanding the money supply without changing the real value of the underlying assets is exactly what Casino Capitalism is all about.  While this is all going on, the banksters get to line their pockets with the ill-gotten gains of money not earned by creating wealth, but skimmed off of the "money from nothing" that THEIR central bank conjured up. 

What was needed was for the institutions/businesses that screwed the whole world over with their games was to go TU - as would any other business.  Yes, the world's economy would suffer a terrible correction, but the sooner it does that, the sooner it can get back on track to funding Main Street instead of Wall Street.

 

[bush_cheney2004]

8 minutes ago, cannuck said:

That guy is simply spouting the same line of absolute BS that banksters have perfected.

 

It may be BS to you, but it worked and was backed by the United States government because the alternative was far more costly.

Your claims of TRILLIONS lost are not proven.

 

Quote

What was needed was for the institutions/businesses that screwed the whole world over with their games was to go TU - as would any other business.  Yes, the world's economy would suffer a terrible correction, but the sooner it does that, the sooner it can get back on track to funding Main Street instead of Wall Street.

 

Good luck with that....many firms did fail.   If the world's economy is dependent on what happens in the U.S. banking system, then that's on them, not American taxpayers or government.     The U.S. banking system is now far more robust than what we see in the EU (i.e. higher reserves, stress testing, etc.).

Canada's banking system starves domestic capital by design, limiting risk, but also limiting opportunity.

 

Edited April 20, 2017 by bush_cheney2004

[cannuck]

6 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Good luck with that....many firms did fail.   If the world's economy is dependent on what happens in the U.S. banking system, then that's on them, not American taxpayers or government.     The U.S. banking system is now far more robust than what we see in the EU (i.e. higher reserves, stress testing, etc.).

 

The only reason that the literal center of the world's financial malfeasance...er BUSINESS - is that ONLY one central bank in the entire world belongs lock stock and barrel to its private member banks.   From that position, it is so cheap and easy to buy each and ever successive administration for a pitance.   Thus, the laws and regs to allow the unbelievable greed, avarice and recklessness disregard for ANYONE else on the plant to have their way with the world are written by and for those very same people who own both the central bank and the administration.

Only in America, as they say.

And, NO, I don't think things are all that much better with banking in this country.

[cannuck]

2 minutes ago, cannuck said:

The only reason that the literal center of the world's financial malfeasance...er BUSINESS - is that ONLY one central bank in the entire world belongs lock stock and barrel to its private member banks.   From that position, it is so cheap and easy to buy each and ever successive administration for a pitance.   Thus, the laws and regs to allow the unbelievable greed, avarice and recklessness disregard for ANYONE else on the plant to have their way with the world are written by and for those very same people who own both the central bank and the administration.

Only in America, as they say.

And, NO, I don't think things are all that much better with banking in this country.  Bay Street is very good at mimicking Wall Street.   Birds of a feather and all that.

 

Edited April 20, 2017 by cannuck

[bush_cheney2004]

1 minute ago, cannuck said:

The only reason that the literal center of the world's financial malfeasance...er BUSINESS - is that ONLY one central bank in the entire world belongs lock stock and barrel to its private member banks.   From that position, it is so cheap and easy to buy each and ever successive administration for a pitance.   Thus, the laws and regs to allow the unbelievable greed, avarice and recklessness disregard for ANYONE else on the plant to have their way with the world are written by and for those very same people who own both the central bank and the administration.

Only in America, as they say.

 

This is by design....it is a feature, not a defect.   America has ALWAYS been about business.  

 

Quote

And, NO, I don't think things are all that much better with banking in this country.

 

It doesn't matter to me what happens with Canada's banking system, but Canada sure as hell pays attention to the U.S. Fed and interest rates.

Canada's banks were also bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.

[cannuck]

On 4/19/2017 at 9:23 PM, bush_cheney2004 said:

This is by design....it is a feature, not a defect.   America has ALWAYS been about business.  

Well, it was at one time about the business of creating wealth and making money.   Today it is all about re-distributing wealth and just printing money to cover the demand for dollars.

THAT, BTW, is the failing of QE.   Every penny spent on this is an inflationary pressure on the greenback - ON TOP of the clearly visible end result that as of two terms of total stupidity, the federal debt increased by the same amount as every other president, administration, war, depression, etc. racked up.

Taxpayer gets the bill, Wall Street gets 100% of the benefit, Main Street gets screwed up of investment.

[bush_cheney2004]

3 minutes ago, cannuck said:

Well, it was at one time about the business of creating wealth and making money.   Today it is all about re-distributing wealth and just printing money to cover the demand for dollars.

 

 

And the demand for U.S. dollars is high....much higher than the demand for Canadian dollars.

Quote

THAT, BTW, is the failing of QE.   Every penny spent on this is an inflationary pressure on the greenback - ON TOP of the clearly visible end result that as of two terms of total stupidity, the federal debt increased by the same amount as every other president, administration, war, depression, etc. racked up.

 

The Fed's objective is 2% inflation...nearly there !

 

Quote

Taxpayer gets the bill, Wall Street gets 100% of the benefit, Main Street gets screwed up of investment.

 

So ?    Government does not create wealth...it just moves it around.

[cannuck]

27 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

And the demand for U.S. dollars is high....much higher than the demand for Canadian dollars.

 

The Fed's objective is 2% inflation...nearly there !

 

 

So ?    Government does not create wealth...it just moves it around.

The "demand" for USD does NOT represent wealth created (imagine how balance sheet looks) it is now only coming from the need to move dollars into Wall Street pockets for literally nothing (but treachery).  If you put a bunch of numbers on one side of your balance sheet, without producing any value on the other, it would force an accounting system to change the value of the markers in that column to balance to the real assets.  Unlike GAAP rules, forex is a very different animal, and as long as the Greenback enjoys de facto hegemony, every other central bank in the world must rush in and buy when the funny money increase in M1 is printed - otherwise their dollar denominated holdings get trashed.   That free ride exists because the member banks own both the Fed and every successive administration, and they can play this game, and bury the resulting inflation in the protection by other central banks in the greenback.  When the movement to replace the USD in that capacity gains enough traction, the US taxpayer is hooped, because THAT is who is on the hook for the trillions that the banksters have stuffed into their jeans.

That 2% inflation is based on CPI, not Forex.   As I just explained, that correction is a pent up force, not one that has been expressed.

Government is not the only thing moving wealth around - the transition of the US economy from a capitalist economy that funds business to create wealth to the casino capitalist economy that merely accommodates wealth re-distribution through speculative gain.  In ANY speculative transaction, there must be a matching loser for ever winner, thus a zero sum game for the suckers who play at the tables.   The big loser is Main Street, that can not hope to compete with dividends from real business against the funny money at the casinos who own the fed.

The responsibility of Government SHOULD be to make rules and enforce them that assures that wealth is created within the economy, and redistributed for SOCIAL policies (such as sick care, health care, welfare, defense and infrastructure).   Instead, the actual rulers of the country - Goldman SUCKS - has the government busy codifying privilege for the speculators to redistribute strictly to satiate the greed.

Geez, even Bernie could figure that one out.

[bush_cheney2004]

1 minute ago, cannuck said:

 and as long as the Greenback enjoys de facto hegemony,

 

This is not going to change anytime soon.   When/if it does, the U.S. will react accordingly.

The Euro and British pound are still on the ropes.

Japanese yen...better.

Canadian dollar...don't ask !

[cannuck]

1 minute ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

This is not going to change anytime soon.   When/if it does, the U.S. will react accordingly.

The Euro and British pound are still on the ropes.

Japanese yen...better.

Canadian dollar...don't ask !

China will some day wipe the greenback out of first place.   The Euro might have done so, but did it ever occur to you that the same people who own the Fed are those who lent seemingly generously and recklessly to the PIIGS?  Could they have intentionally trashed the Euro that threatened their free ride on the backs of the world?  Naaaahhhhh, banksters are nice guys, they would never do anything like that.   BTW:   I've got both my WY ocean front property and my bridge in Brooklyn up for sale if you agree with that.

Why is it every time you know you are hooped, or don't know of what you write, you mount a frontal attack on something Canadian that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the subject under discussion?

[bush_cheney2004]

4 minutes ago, cannuck said:

China will some day wipe the greenback out of first place.  

 

That's great....any day now, right ?    So the U.S. should just roll over ?

 

Quote

The Euro might have done so,

 

But it didn't.   Reality bites that way.

 

Quote

Why is it every time you know you are hooped, or don't know of what you write, you mount a frontal attack on something Canadian that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the subject under discussion?

 

Because this is the exact same tactic used by many other members...invoking the U.S. whenever they wish.

The Canadian banking system is not my concern, but apparently the U.S. dollar, Fed, and American government policies matter a lot to you.

 

[cannuck]

9 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Because this is the exact same tactic used by many other members...invoking the U.S. whenever they wish.

The Canadian banking system is not my concern, but apparently the U.S. dollar, Fed, and American government policies matter a lot to you.

 

Sinking to their level does nothing for your cause or credibility.

Yes, the US Fed, the greenback and policies matter a great deal to me.  I am a Canadian citizen and resident by choice, but the vast majority of my business is located in the US, or based there and operating in Europe, Asia and South America.  It is also done almost exclusively in USD.  This is the case for just about anyone who does business internationally.

[bush_cheney2004]

1 minute ago, cannuck said:

Sinking to their level does nothing for your cause or credibility.

 

I have no cause or desire for credibility.   I am reality, which is satisfaction enough...and always very entertaining.

 

Quote

Yes, the US Fed, the greenback and policies matter a great deal to me.  I am a Canadian citizen and resident by choice, but the vast majority of my business is located in the US, or based there and operating in Europe, Asia and South America.  It is also done almost exclusively in USD.  This is the case for just about anyone who does business internationally.

 

Yes, I know.   Forgive me me if I rub that in too often.

Canadian banking system is so good, but so very irrelevant to me and many others.

 

[cannuck]

1 minute ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

I have no cause or desire for credibility.   I am reality, which is satisfaction enough...and always very entertaining.

 

I fear exactly that: you DO represent reality very accurately.   All I ask is that you open your mind and see what is actually going on around you.

[bush_cheney2004]

Just now, cannuck said:

I fear exactly that: you DO represent reality very accurately.   All I ask is that you open your mind and see what is actually going on around you.

 

But I like reality, not make believe.   Photographs preferred over paintings.

Open mind to what ?   Your desires for what my government should be doing....from Canada ?

[cannuck]

1 minute ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

 

But I like reality, not make believe.   Photographs preferred over paintings.

Open mind to what ?   Your desires for what my government should be doing....from Canada ?

If you really prefer reality, look a lot further than the talking notes from the uniparty.

Open you mind to what your government (and others) are DOING, and why.  For reference see the preceding paragraph.

[bush_cheney2004]

5 minutes ago, cannuck said:

If you really prefer reality, look a lot further than the talking notes from the uniparty.

Open you mind to what your government (and others) are DOING, and why.  For reference see the preceding paragraph.

 

I don't care why...but it seems to matter a great deal to you...outside the United States.

Now why is that ?    When Russians do that it is a scandal !

Please understand that I have never lived under the power of another nation's economy, dollar valuation, or central bank decisions.

Canadian media quotes valuations in USD...it is the Canadian mindset and expectation...for now.   Not my U.S. experience...ever.

 

Edited April 25, 2017 by bush_cheney2004

[cannuck]

I think you missed one important point:  I LIVE outside of the US, but I do business there and have responsibility for a lot of assets there.  Got to sprint and do some more of that capitalist pig stuff.  Later.