Banking logic and illogic

Chicken Little comes home to roost and bankers everywhere are running for cover. Among those hammered by the anti-greed squad in DC is Swiss megabank UBS, which has long served as banking haven for money lauderers, tax evaders and probably a fair number of alimony skanks. First fined $780 million for defrauding the IRS, the bank is now under pressure to release the names of american investors who have used the Swiss banking system in order to evade paying taxes at home. This could be upwards of 40,000 people; in settling their tax fraud case, the bank provided totals of investment gains on which taxes were evaded, but stood by their Swiss ethics [sic] of not revealing clients' identities. It's an interesting position, because when the bank protects individual investors from being pursued by the long arm of the law, it opens itself up to taking the hits for them. Evidently, they are taking some kind of long-term view that what they lose in penalties is more than made up for by what they hold in assets for the world's wealthy, even though they are reporting billions in losses right now. Not ratting out your clients probably functions as something of a marketing strategy in these tenuous times.

The interesting thing about this report is not what is said in hearings or narration, but the names and numbers in the ticker that runs throughout. More than half of US lawmakers received contributions from UBS, including Obama, Clinton, Emmanuel, Pelosi - all the heavies are there, along with both democratic and republican national committees. Do americans really expect these people to bite the hands that feed them? If they do, then there is illogic breeding on both sides of the great divide.

After 10 years of steering clear of the banking system, i recently felt cornered into opening an account in order to deal with online money transfers. This is a crazy, illogical act when so many people are cashing out, but it's become impossible to expand my income base without doing so. i'm thinking the trick is to remove the cash as soon as it arrives... we'll see how this goes. i do not trust banks and am not keen on the way the whole banking system is run. Yet freelancing outside the system is simply impossible. Paying with cash feels more and more like a lower form on the evolutionary scale, yet i've been accutely aware of the benefits such constraints yield. When i think about the amount of money that was extracted by my former banks every time i used an ATM, even to make a deposit, i just hang my head in shame for being such a sucker. And i know i'm going to do so again, especially when it comes to losses due to official currency exchange rates, but here the logic of UBS comes to my rescue. Excuse me now while i go crack some eggs.