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It Pays To Be A Bank
Banks. It's good to be one.
Quarterly results from a handful of majors on Wednesday showed it still
“Room to improve penetration” – when you’re a bank, they just let you do it.
Finally, someone is looking out for those poor, starving bankers. The MAGA faithful can sleep tight knowing the bankers and tech titans will be able to fill up their money bins to the tippy top and Trump’s cabinet will protect them from the big, bad DEI officers.
Having a bank franchise is a license to make money. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight at SVB should have read the chapter on asset liability management. Repeat after me, do not invest in long dated fixed rate assets if funded by short dated hot funds. If they had they would still be tonning it.
Bankers may complain about regulatory oversight (most regulations actually get enacted because of abuses by those same bankers) but that also impedes competitive entry along with hefty capital requirements.
A week or so ago, a “private” banker at my local Chase outlet contacted me to flag the fact I had a large balance in a checking account at the bank. Is that a bad thing? I asked. Well, it’s attached to a debit card, which might be lost or hacked (not reassuring). But you have measures in place — withdrawal caps, fraud alerts — to protect me, right? Well, yes, but…, he replied. What would you have me do, I said. Well, you could move it to a savings account, he said. And what’s the rate on that? I asked. 0.01 percent, he said. Really? And the fed funds rate is around 4.5 percent and you’re charging $39 for late payment on credit cards? I said. Yes, but…, he said. I’ll think about it, I said. Thanks for reaching out.
Banksters, can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
H-Man, the MAGA faithfull fail to grasp that Trump with the Mar Lago gig and all of its trimmings are not the trappings of the commoner. These are very rich people doing what very rich people do.