This video shows some Occupy Santa Cruz (California) protesters trying to close their accounts at Bank of America and being told they can't protest and be customers at the same time. It says so in the U.S. Constitution!
With falling stock prices, debit-card users flipping out about the company's plan to steal $5 from them every month, and a brand-new lawsuit on their hot little hands, the devil worshipers at Bank of America aren't too thrilled about reporters talking to their customers right now. But journalists must report on the news, and so the Arkansas correspondent for the New York Times stopped by a branch in Fayetteville to get some customer feedback on the bank's latest thieving scheme. B of A did not appreciate that very much.
I have an idea: I ask you to loan me some money. Then when it's time for me to pay you back, I'll charge you a fee, for holding that money, and another fee, for giving the money back to you. Welcome to the modern American consumer banking system.
They say you can't take your money with you when you die—and you can't take your debt, either. When people move on to that great air-conditioned lobby in the sky, their banks sometimes ask—and ask, and ask—their grieving families to pay off remaining debts.
We all know how banks screwed us over royally in the macro sense of the term, but it's nice to know that they still take out the time to deliver the shaft to their customers on an individual basis.
Bank of America feels just awful about it's role in packaging and selling a bunch of junk mortgages and inflating the economy with bad debt until the bottom fell out and more than 5 million people lost their jobs and more than 2.5 million went on food stamps, except for BofA's executives, who still got paid. So it's decided to pay $14 billion to BlackRock, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a bunch of other extremely wealthy institutions to make up for it. Are we square?
Florida homeowners Maurenn Nyergers and her husband paid for their home in cash, and never took out a mortgage, so when Bank of America filed foreclosure papers on the house, they took the bank to court, and won. And when Bank of America wouldn't pay their legal fees — as it was ordered to by the court — their attorney, Todd Allen, decided to seize its assets, in person, with movers and sheriff's deputies in tow.
A member of the activist collective Anonymous is claiming to be have emails and documents which prove "fraud" was committed by Bank of America employees, and the group says it'll release them on Monday. The member, who goes by the Twitter handle OperationLeakS, has already posted an internal email from the formerly Bank of America-owned Balboa Insurance Company.
Wall Street is feeling flush, clearly. Yesterday afternoon, a "resurgent" Bank of America announced that it plans to repay the $45 billion in government aid it received during the darkest days of the financial crisis last fall. And while you might expect that Goldman Sachs to be on the defensive given all the negative press that's come its way in recent weeks, it's behaving in quite the opposite fashion according to the Wall Street Journal, which reports the bank has been meeting with its investors recently to convince them why its employees are totally entitled to record bonuses this year. And then there's Deutsche Bank:
Jon Corzine was unseated as New Jersey's governor yesterday. Meanwhile, Bank of America is desperately seeking a new CEO and just yesterday announced it would be fine with having its next chief based in the New York area, instead of at BofA HQ in Charlotte. Is it possible that Jon Corzine could decide to return to his Wall Street roots and take over the troubled bank? Stranger things have happened, clearly. [Dealbreaker]
