Sentiment Survey Finds Americans Like Community Banks Much More Than Big Banks

The story with video interview is here.

The top commenter on the story points to nickel and dime fees by big banks as the single most important reason why Americans switch to community banks from big banks.

The survey finds customers of big banks twice as likely to say they get gouged by fees.

The Fed is subsidizing all banks to the tune of $100 billion per quarter in artificially depressed income to depositors

Chris Whalen, last November, here:

Chief among the data points to be noted is that net interest expense, which is the money paid to depositors at banks, continues to fall.  While all banks earned about $118 billion in interest income last quarter, they paid just $13 billion to depositors, a graphic example of the “financial repression” used by the Fed to subsidize the US banking industry.  Via QE, the Fed is subsidizing all banks to the tune of over $100 billion per quarter in artificially depressed interest cost and income to depositors of all stripes.

Another blooper from Drudge's incompetent help

Dinesh D'Souza's Mistake Is Failing To Take The Enemy For An Enemy

Conservatism in the United States is fatally flawed because it is incapable of imagining that the opposition is the enemy, even when the enemy openly comes after it. Under the influence of Christian teaching, it turns the other cheek also only to get slapped again, as if naming the enemy were itself a transgression. This makes them no different in spirit from the disarmament crowd, as misguided by utopianism derived from religion as revolutionaries are by ideology.

Conservatism is full of people like Dinesh D'Souza who keep saying "so and so should say this", "so and so should not say that", and "so and so ought to do such and such" or "they shouldn't be doing that" when the facts staring them in the face at every turn demonstrate that the opposition is not behaving in any way like countrymen who act in good faith as the opposition but like foreign agents working in the service of a different loyalty. Continuing to protest that the enemy is not playing according to the rules is not going to stop the enemy.

Seen here:

“I think it is the broader pattern of going after people who are critics,” he continued. “Not just me, but the Hollywood guys, the group Friends of Abe, these are Hollywood guys who are conservatives. So I think there is a sense here that Obama treats his critics not merely as people who disagree, but as enemies.”

When the rubber hits the road, as in the critical period just before an election, as here in October 2010, the president makes it plain how he wants his peeps to view us:

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Why You Should Boycott ObamaCare If You're Under Age 44

Because at your age you are most likely to die of violence, not disease, and you'll get better care for violence without insurance.

Story here:

Researchers from the Stanford University of Medicine found that patients with insurance are less likely to get the best care than those who do not have insurance. They found that insured patients taken to non-trauma hospitals were 13 to 15 percent less likely to be transferred to trauma centers than uninsured ones. ...

Shootings and traffic accidents are the most common causes of death in this county among people under 44-years-old.  Previous research has shown that severely injured patients are 2 percent less likely to die if treated at a top-ranked trauma center than at a non-trauma center.

And Now A Word From The Paternal Fascists At Wells Fargo

Seen here:

“Retirement security is a shared responsibility between government, business, and individual and a system that is designed to motivate all stakeholders will drive the best outcome for Americans to achieve retirement security, said Joe Ready, director of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement and Trust.

In the good old days your retirement was no one's responsibility but your own.

How Speculators Redistribute Wealth: Find The Greater Fool

John Hussman, here:

It is certainly possible for any individual investor to realize wealth from an overvalued security by selling it, but this requires another investor to buy that overvalued security. The wealth of the seller is obtained by redistributing that wealth from the buyer. 

Drudge Can't Spell "Auschwitz"

Yeah, "Auchwitz", as in what, "also a joke"?

My Whirlpool Appliances Have Had 5 Failures In 5 Years While They've Tried To Hire 765 H1B And Green Card Foreigners At High Salaries Since 2001: Coincidence?

Image source here.

Actually, Just 10% Of Arizonans Defeated The Speed Cameras

Before Gov. Brewer pulled Janet Napolitano's speed cameras, 676,668 violators simply ignored their $181 or greater speeding tickets, about 10% of the 2012 population.

Imagine 31 million Americans not paying the $95 fine for not having insurance: that's only $3 billion. But 31 million Americans each not buying a $5,000 policy is $155 billion.

If 61% Of Arizonans Can Defeat Big Sis' Speed Cameras By Not Paying, Americans Can Do The Same To ObamaCare

Flashback to the November 2010 story in CAR AND DRIVER, "Arizona's Speed Cameras Come Down . . . Arizona drivers win one with civil disobedience" here:

Last summer [2009], with Arizona locked in a national shouting match over its clampdown on illegal immigration, the state’s Republican governor was quietly pulling the plug on a two-year photo-camera reign of terror that nailed 1,109,035 motorists, mostly along a Phoenix freeway, with mail-in citations that started at $181. Governor Jan Brewer called the cameras “invasive” and said she believed they were put in place by Janet Napolitano, her Democratic predecessor, as a “revenue-generating solution to solving our budget [problems].” Others pointed out that the state got only half the cash projected by Napolitano—about $64 million instead of $120 million. And that was because only 39 percent of those ticketed drivers (432,367 of 1,109,035) knuckled under and paid up—the other 61 percent simply tossed the tickets and then avoided process servers for 90 days.

Ann Coulter Says The Only Way To Get Rid Of ObamaCare Is To Elect The Republicans Who Invented It

And anybody who tells you differently is a con man or scam artist.

Here.

Uh huh.

Corporate Cash Is At $1.9 Trillion

Story here.

GLD is down to 795.61 tons

Seen here:

SPDR Gold Trust, the world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, said its holdings fell 0.70 percent to 795.61 tons on Wednesday from 801.25 tons on Tuesday.

---------------

Holdings have fallen 25% since May 2013.

Oops: Last Fall NOAA Predicted Above Normal Temps November Through January

Reported here:

Surprised by how tough this winter has been? You’re in good company: Last fall the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states. ... The big red blotch in the top map represents parts of the country in which the Climate Prediction Center forecast above-average temperatures. The frigid-looking blue blotch in the bottom “verification” map shows areas where temperatures turned out to be below average. “Not one of our better forecasts,” admits Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director.

----------------------------------------------

How come the experts are always surprised?

This is another climate model failure, you know the kind, like the ones which claim global warming continues even though it stopped fourteen years ago.

Peggy Noonan Wants To Know: "What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?"

Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu

This, Peggy.

Column here.

How The 2009 Stimulus Has Hidden The Obama Decline

As everyone knows by now, when the Democrats swept into power in the 2008 election one of the first things they did was pass the stimulus spending bill in February 2009, five years ago this month.

The passage of the stimulus has been a boon to Democrats and their program. One, the added spending for fiscal 2009 got charged to George Bush's account, not Obama's, making Bush's spending record look worse than it was. Two, the added spending became the new baseline for spending in every year since, keeping government big, its most insidious affect. Three, because Republicans retook the House in 2010, spending in 2011 and 2012 has had to hew more closely to what it was in 2009 because of Tea Party demands to put the brakes on spending, allowing Obama to brag that he's kept government spending increases low for a longer period of time than has been usual. This is sort of like how Obama takes credit for our oil production boom, which happens in spite of him on private lands, not because of him.

What's so disturbing about the increase to baseline spending is that over 75% of the GDP gains for 2009 through 2012 can be attributed to that, not to anything real in the US economy. In other words, GDP growth from government spending has been propping up reported GDP and masking the severity of the current economic depression in which millions of homeowners remain underwater, similar millions remain without work after five years, and those still working suffer under a real multi-year decline in their earnings because of stagnant wages and increased costs for food, energy, clothing, healthcare and taxes. The middle class is being pushed inexorably downward. Like the infamous Climategate emails which showed an effort by scientists to hide the decline in global temperatures over the last decade, US government spending has been doing the same for the decline of GDP.

The figures are startling.

Using 2008 as the baseline from Table 3A of the Bureau of Economic Analysis's summer 2013 comprehensive revision of GDP ($14,720.3 billion), the net increase to GDP in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012 relative to 2008 was $2.8782 trillion:

2009    -302.4 billion dollars

2010   +238.0

2011   +813.5

2012 +1524.3.

Similarly, using 2008 as the baseline for federal outlays as tracked by the Tax Policy Center using figures from the OMB ($2,982.5 billion), the net increase to federal spending in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012, again, relative to 2008, was $2.1841 trillion:

2009 +535.2 billion dollars

2010 +473.7

2011 +620.6

2012 +554.6.

Thus the nominal gain in GDP relative to 2008 for all four years apart from nominal increases to government spending has been all of $694.1 billion, for a gain overall of 4.71% since 2008, 1.17% per annum on average, one of the most appalling records in all of American history because that figure is not adjusted for inflation. The all items CPI has risen 19.388 seasonally adjusted between January 1, 2009 and January 1, 2013, an increase of 9.1% which completely wipes out the nominal GDP gain of 4.71%.

So GDP has actually been negative for the whole of Obama's first term, but completely hidden from view by the increase to baseline spending caused by the 2009 stimulus. If it has felt like a depression, it's because it is one.

59% Of American Adults Sympathize With The Main Goal Of Communism, And 83% Of Democrats Do

The goal? Wealth redistribution.

Gallup. April 2013. Here.

Garbage in, K-12 . . . garbage out forevermore.

No wonder upper class self-identification is down a whopping 29% under the leader. 

Social Conservatives Save, Liberals Just Go Into Debt

Social conservatives tax themselves (it's called saving for retirement, now $21.9 trillion saved), liberals tax everyone but never save anything (it's called the Total Public Debt, now $17.3 trillion owed).

Gold Stats For 2013

The gold stats for 2013 are out, reported here:

• Chinese consumer demand: a record 1,066 tonnes.
• Indian consumer demand: 975 tonnes.
• Global consumer demand: 3,864 tonnes.
• Average price: $1,411/ounce, down 15% from 2012.
• Overall demand: 3,756 tonnes, down 15% from 2012.
• Net outflows from ETFs: 881 tonnes.
• Central bank purchases: 369 tonnes, down 32% from 2012 when demand was at its highest in half a century.