There are some elements of finance that even I struggle with.  For example, how can you draw a line from a wheat farmer in Nebraska to a bankrupt brokerage in New-York City?  Maybe that connection is easy, but why is the farmer’s money missing just because the farmer’s brokerage company went bankrupt?  And why are [...]

Even though Occupy Wall Street has lost some of its muster, the message has been loud and clear, people are pissed off.  The easiest target has been Wall Street, and it will likely remain that way for some time.  They certainly deserve a lot of the blame, blame they’ve been getting since 2007.  Over the [...]

Yesterday, a couple of financial blogs linked to a wall post on Reddit, a website that last I saw was where you go to see cool links to stuff, not where people post anonymous rants.  The Reddit post claims to be written by someone who works on Wall Street.  They go off on a long [...]

Hopefully by now you’ve heard of the meltdown and bankruptcy of MF Global.  MF Global was a commodity and futures broker (if you don’t know what that is don’t worry it’s not important) that Corzine ran from March of last year until last week. If you don’t know of Jon Corzine he’s well known amongst [...]

In the business world, there’s a term called “Voice of the Customer”, or “VOC“.  Some businesses ignore VOC while others devotes millions of dollars and resources to it.  I’ve seen the term used quite loosely, but essentially it refers to the process of capturing what the customer wants.  It serves as the check for which [...]

There are no shortage of articles out there talking about the end of free checking accounts.  They crop up every couple of weeks in conjunction with a new debit card fee, or a new regulation, or something.  They are crappy pieces of journalism that don’t add any value to a conversation.  It’s like every week [...]

As much crap as I or anyone give about the government, they do some fantastic reporting. As my headline suggests, I’ve got five charts from the FDIC that tell two interesting stories about banks. The first story is relevant to our current economic times, the second is just merely interesting. Let’s start with the overall [...]

If you’ve got decent credit you can get a mortgage right now for somewhere around 4.5% or less.  These are lows not seen in a lifetime and likely not going to be seen for a lifetime to come.  Interest rates on other loans are also at lifetime lows.  But people still aren’t buying houses and [...]