I’m really tired of the rumbledy-toss of big banks buying small fry – and then going under due to hilarity at the home office.

We use two banks and a credit union; the latter is WAY out of state, and I’d transfer over to that except that we’d never have a local bank.

Bank #1 was Mid-America, which was bought by National City, which was then bought up by a big Pittsburgh bank.  Bank #2 was a local bank, which was then purchased by Park National, and subsequently went bust and was taken over by the FDIC  and is now part of US Bank – another Big Bank.  In both of the cases, heavy mismanagement at the top killed the banks.

National City, however, has had some heavy use of fees and charges, and just this week zinged us for a $100 with three overdraft fees – except that there was no actual overdraft.  Just that there might have been one the next day, except that we had put in a deposit that they decided not to consider relevant.  According to online sources I’ve been reading, they are notorious for this sort of stunt, and I’m sick of it.

I complained, and they told me to stick it.

Any suggestions for a new bank for us greatly appreciated – IF the bank isn’t one of these big outfits that mismanaged their way into serious problems and then decided to squeeze all of their customers to make up the difference.  We live out in the DuPage suburbs of Chicago, if that helps.

AP has a map here (interactive flash) on local economic conditions; my home county (DuPage) has (in the last two years) seen unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies double, and we’re nowhere near the bottom.  Check it out.

Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it:

Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election. “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

No lie there, dude.   You can’t make news organization hot profit centers or milk cows for your big corporation with turning them into worthless piles of tabloid junk, centered on the cheap and dirty and not getting people to understand and think.

Interesting article on how India’s endemic corruption problems are holding the country back, with this comment from the Prime Minister:

“The pervasive corruption in our country tarnishes our image [and it] discourages investors who expect fair treatment and transparent dealings with public authorities.”

Read it all.

The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports that five SEC exams and investigations of Bernie Madoff were incompetently done.   I can believe one screwup happened, but five?  Five is agency policy to not look too hard.

Both Markopolos and an SEC staff accountant testified that it was clear the Boston office’s assistant district administrator at the time “did not understand the information presented,’’ Inspector General David Kotz wrote in a blistering report. As a result, the Boston staff failed to investigate the complaint or, at first, to even refer it to the regional office in New York, according to the inspector general.

and:

“Moreover, we found that Madoff proactively informed potential investors that the SEC had examined his operations. When potential investors expressed hesitation about investing with Madoff, he cited the prior SEC examinations to establish credibility and allay suspicions or investor doubts that may have arisen while due diligence was being conducted.”

This was a man who was a former chairman of NASDAQ, and his family and he were on all sorts of securities industry oversight and control boards, including the industry’s internal compliance office.   He got away with his actions because there was a lot of loose money floating around, he was a fantastic con artist, and because of his numerous connections.  The Chinese call this guanxi, 关系 – the old-boy-network.

As in ‘we can’t being him to justice; he’s one of the connected people. Laws and taxes are for the little people.’

Dirty little secret #1: Not everyone who gets through law school with a diploma gets a law job. Not guaranteed, though it’s a common misconception – by non-lawyers – that law school graduates are not automatically given cushy jobs, that all law jobs pay astronomically well, and job security is everything.  Oh, yeah, and that anyone who *does* have a law degree will never be happy with a non-law job, so don’t give them one.

Dirty little secret #2: when there’s fewer jobs in law practices available, the state bar associations play hanky-pank with the pass rates on the bar exams.  Suddenly, a score that would get you a pass last year is way below what you need this year.

Imagine that.

And yes, it’s been 26 years since I graduated from law school, and I’ve never really worked as a lawyer, and I’m just as happy.

The shoe company is going under; a combination of saturating its market and people cutting back.

…being played against Chinese state-controlled firms vis-a-vis foreign mining and iron mill outfits.    The Chinese have a response; their own Gulag, where the rule of law is variable and limited at best.

Which is the essential problem in dealing with China, business-wise.  The whole 关系 guanxi / baksheesh ’special connections’ situation is all-important, and the rules are massively secondary, unless you step on someone’s toe, in which case, the rules can and will be interpreted as the person in power requires.

Website for the remains of the old GM that they’re liquidating.   Wanna buy a golf course or a Superfund site?

At the first day of hearings on GM’s proposed asset sale restructuring chief Albert Koch estimated on June 30 that the company’s environmental liabilities for all sites are $530 million. Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson said money needed to wind down the old GM was $1.25 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $950 million, because of a reassessment of the environmental liabilities.

“The new GM hardly needs to be in the golf course business,” said Tom Wilkinson, GM’s director of news relations, in an e-mail. “The old GM will be selling a lot of potentially valuable but peripheral property the company accumulated over 100 years, kind of like a big garage sale. You will see some really good real estate deals come out of this for investors and communities.”

Post from Nate Silver pointing out how people are economizing: no dry-cleaning, no Starbucks, brownbagging lunch, buying generics, cutting out bottled water and bringing water bottles, cancelling subscriptions (magazines and newspapers), and so on.

Courtesy of Paul Riddell and the New York Times, an examination of the inanities and OMG-its-not-selling of the present-day jewelry industry.  Thanks, Paul!

Ritz Camera chain in the US likely to liquidate, as people are using them less and less in favor of digital photography which is then uploaded via the Internet to be printed up cheaply elsewhere.

Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend.

And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer.

Also check out Felix Salmon at Reuters,  Bonddad, Robert Reich, the Epicurean Dealmaker, Barry Ritholtz, Paul Krugman in the NYT op-ed area and his NYT blog for other voices worth listening to on high finance and economics.

I have my own suspicions, but the Californians who have opinions who regularly read my journal can read this posting in the Mahablog (which I regularly read) and see if they agree about the breakdown of the political process in the Golden State.

Here also is a quick breakdown of who is paid in IOUs and who is paid in cash.

The rise and fall of Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s rubber plantation in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Bring Your Gun To Church Day” in Louisville.  Check your ammo at the door.

Cornish Pasty flavored potato chips, which has to be one of the least expected ones I every could think of.   And a domestic quarrel using Cheetos as a weapon on both sides in Tennessee.

Possibly the wildest-furnished mansion I’ve seen for a while, up for sale.  (tip to Becky Zoole for this one)

The Art and Folklore of Raccoon Dog Testicles, involving “Shall we gather at the river” being turned into a schoolyard song in Japan about that subject.

Risk map setup from air toxics risks on causing cancer in the USA via the EPA:

Parts of Los Angeles, Calif., and Madison County, Ill., had the highest cancer risks in the nation — 1200 in 1 million and 1100 in 1 million, according to the EPA data. They were followed by two neighborhoods in Allegheny County, Pa., and one in Tuscaloosa County, Ala.

“Air toxic risks are local. They are a function of the sources nearest to you,” said Dave Guinnup, who leads the groups that perform the risk assessments for toxic air pollutants at EPA. “If you are out in the Rocky Mountains, you are going to be closer to 2 in a million. If you are in an industrial area with a lot of traffic, you are going to be closer to 1100 in 1 million.”

As per LonOtter’s comments elsewhere.  The recent set of bad storms in the Chicago area did a lot of damage in regard to tree breakage; my boss called up on Friday – she was working at home and said that her internet / phone was out, and there was roof damage on her new roof.  So I tried to help her with info on checking the cable line into the house versus cable modem, etc., to see if that was the problem.

Our next-door neighbors came over yesterday to report that a big branch off a tree in our backyard (that hangs over theirs) was partially broken (over their property) and hanging dangerously over the local power lines, and would I please call ComEd (the power utility) and ask about if they could take care of that before the branch broke all the way and took out everyone’s power?  I said sure, called up the power folks, and a couple of guys came out yesterday, looked at it and told me:

(1) ComEd comes through every 4 years or so and does tree work on trees that are getting into the lines.  No more, no less.

(2) Until the tree limb falls off and knocks out the line, ComEd will do zero to remove the branch.   Then, it becomes an emergency.  Till then, you want it down, you pay for it.

Did I ever tell you about how much I have grown to hate brittle Black Locust trees, and people who can’t think forward to avoid emergencies?  Thought so.

Eddie Bauer goes bankrupt.

“Now you have too many stores chasing shoppers who are more cash- and credit-constrained than any time post-World War II,” said retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group.

No kidding.

I’ve been wondering why the old US Post Office that surrounds the Western expressway entrance into downtown Chicago has remained intact and empty all this time.   Here’s the reason: nobody will take it.