Recently, I saw someone say on Facebook, or some blogger post, or some forum that Facebook was the WalMart of social networking. Let's assume this is true for the moment. Can we at least aspire to Costco performance?
WalMart can come in handy. You pretty much know what to expect whether it is a WalMart in Arizona or Alaska. It is open convenient hours and you won't pay outrageous prices for anything you buy there. You won't find the best products or service there either. The same goes for Facebook.
I see some of my Facebook friends posting some pretty good things, stuff that deserves a wider audience than their 204 friends or even their 2843 friends of friends. So, what we need is a way to preserve the convenience and at perceived intimacy of Facebook while getting out to the larger world.
Perhaps there can be great linkage to the Google-blogspot-blogger world? Let's see. Facebook friends, I am experimenting on you.
[Sidenote: I have not used Blogger for a few months, but I have been typing things into computers for about 41 years and have written C++ code performing bit-level functions. I hit the Preview button, get my preview, and my only choices are to publish or preview. Huh? What if I want to edit? Oh, I see... I need to close the tab I'm on, or at least move off it, and get back to the tab (still open) that I came from and edit over there. This is idiotic. Most software seems to be written by morons.]
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Bigger Than The Hood River Library
Note: This is an opinion piece I submitted to the Hood River News on July 7, 2010. Since then, Hood River County has had a second referendum on the library and decided to reopen it. But, you just don't throw the doors open and shazam! the library is back. It is gradually getting there. Remember, tea partiers: destroy our public treasures and you just may have trouble getting them back. But the article isn't about the library, anyway...
I’m glad we are still talking about the Hood River Library. Back and forth the letters flew, but in the end we voted on it and decided we didn’t want to pay the $900,000 a year to keep it open. At times, it seemed like the library was all Hood River wanted to talk about the last six months.
I really wanted that library open. Still, I don’t think that is what we should have been arguing about. Another closure was much more important.
On January 22, 2010, Columbia River Bank (CRB) went broke. They blew all of the bank’s own money and then dipped into their customers’ accounts, taking an estimated $172 million from depositor’s checking and savings accounts they couldn’t put back. They gambled away this money on bad real estate deals. Our tax dollars are being used to pay the money back for them.
News accounts were not that blunt, but that’s what happened. I thought the spectacle of a local bank going broke would get people’s attention. Instead, the little I heard seemed nonsense, fantasies of people trying to make themselves feel better.
I heard the government should have bailed out Columbia River Bank before it went broke instead of Bank of America. Somehow, because CRB’s headquarters were in The Dalles, that makes them more deserving? We wanted to risk wasting more than $172 million on CRB?
I heard we should blame the government and make believe CRB was a great bank, despite all the facts to the contrary. Somehow, blaming government is a popular, simple answer to everything these days, but it never makes me feel good. It usually just relieves people behaving badly from accepting responsibility for their own actions.
I heard that banks fail because the government has programs to make poor people richer and rich people poorer. But wasn’t it banks, not the government, that loaned all that money to people who could not pay it back? Did the government force them to do that? Did poor people force them to do that? More likely, bankers made terribly risky bets they thought had the greatest potential payback, knowing taxpayers cover those bets when they lose. As far as the government abusing rich people, I have yet to hear stories of local bank executives or directors selling their houses, cars, or boats to put the money they squandered back in our accounts. Regular old taxpayers, many quite poor, do this for them.
And, I heard the real tragedy of CRB going broke not was not the $172 million they took from their customers’ bank accounts, but all the money their shareholders lost. But shouldn’t people buying stock know that this is risky business, something much different than putting money in a bank account? If they don’t know that, they should. It is all part of that personal responsibility thing we hear so much about.
Maybe it is time for us to grow up, think, and act like adults.
One thing that gets in our way is the confusing language banks use. News accounts of bank failures usually state “deposits” and “assets” as if these are equally good things. When a bank loans $500,000 for a house to someone who states unverified income of less than $40,000 a year (an actual case, a typical “liar’s loan”), the bank records this as a $500,000 bank asset. It remains a $500,000 asset even when the house can be sold for only $200,000. “Asset” no longer has the positive connotation we usually assume, does it?
Another bank word is “capitalization”, which means, essentially, the bank’s own money, not the money in our bank accounts. Contrary to what I have heard, the government does not destroy a bank’s capitalization. A bank loses money when it loans money to someone who does not pay it back, the bank pays more for something than what it is worth, or they don’t keep their expenses in line, say, by perhaps paying their executives too much. All of these things are terribly foolish, especially for a banker, who is supposed to know all about money.
In 1999, Congress caved into bank lobbyists and repealed major portions of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933 during the Great Depression to protect our bank accounts. For the last eleven years, banks have had unprecedented freedom to gamble with our money.
The theory was that the free market would reward the wise banks and punish the foolish. The reality was that banks created phony products like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that sliced and diced their mortgages beyond recognition and then sold them back and forth to each other. They just got richer and richer until the whole thing fell apart in 2008. They came to the U.S. government and said the world economy would collapse unless taxpayers paid back the money they had taken from our bank accounts and squandered.
This is serious. Banks are right back to the same game because Republicans in Congress are refusing to restore any serious regulation, the kind that worked from 1933 to 1999. Banks continue to make risky bets. Their charade reform is to curtail loans to homeowners and small businesses, the people who pay for their mistakes.
If you can’t put a paycheck in the bank, know what a dollar is really worth, and know that your money will be there when you want it, you aren’t going to be able to pay for a library or anything else. Speaking of which, let’s see—$172 million of taxpayer’s money to pay for CRB’s mistakes—that would have paid for 100 years, maybe 200 years of the library’s budget. Heck, in a good bank paying decent interest, the money we spent on CRB (and got nothing for) could have kept our library open forever with gobs of money left over.
Maybe we should be watching the banks instead of arguing about library volunteers. Call or write your representative and tell him if he does not support serious bank regulation you will never vote for him or anyone like him again.
Joel Spinhirne has lived in the Hood River Valley since 1993.
I’m glad we are still talking about the Hood River Library. Back and forth the letters flew, but in the end we voted on it and decided we didn’t want to pay the $900,000 a year to keep it open. At times, it seemed like the library was all Hood River wanted to talk about the last six months.
I really wanted that library open. Still, I don’t think that is what we should have been arguing about. Another closure was much more important.
On January 22, 2010, Columbia River Bank (CRB) went broke. They blew all of the bank’s own money and then dipped into their customers’ accounts, taking an estimated $172 million from depositor’s checking and savings accounts they couldn’t put back. They gambled away this money on bad real estate deals. Our tax dollars are being used to pay the money back for them.
News accounts were not that blunt, but that’s what happened. I thought the spectacle of a local bank going broke would get people’s attention. Instead, the little I heard seemed nonsense, fantasies of people trying to make themselves feel better.
I heard the government should have bailed out Columbia River Bank before it went broke instead of Bank of America. Somehow, because CRB’s headquarters were in The Dalles, that makes them more deserving? We wanted to risk wasting more than $172 million on CRB?
I heard we should blame the government and make believe CRB was a great bank, despite all the facts to the contrary. Somehow, blaming government is a popular, simple answer to everything these days, but it never makes me feel good. It usually just relieves people behaving badly from accepting responsibility for their own actions.
I heard that banks fail because the government has programs to make poor people richer and rich people poorer. But wasn’t it banks, not the government, that loaned all that money to people who could not pay it back? Did the government force them to do that? Did poor people force them to do that? More likely, bankers made terribly risky bets they thought had the greatest potential payback, knowing taxpayers cover those bets when they lose. As far as the government abusing rich people, I have yet to hear stories of local bank executives or directors selling their houses, cars, or boats to put the money they squandered back in our accounts. Regular old taxpayers, many quite poor, do this for them.
And, I heard the real tragedy of CRB going broke not was not the $172 million they took from their customers’ bank accounts, but all the money their shareholders lost. But shouldn’t people buying stock know that this is risky business, something much different than putting money in a bank account? If they don’t know that, they should. It is all part of that personal responsibility thing we hear so much about.
Maybe it is time for us to grow up, think, and act like adults.
One thing that gets in our way is the confusing language banks use. News accounts of bank failures usually state “deposits” and “assets” as if these are equally good things. When a bank loans $500,000 for a house to someone who states unverified income of less than $40,000 a year (an actual case, a typical “liar’s loan”), the bank records this as a $500,000 bank asset. It remains a $500,000 asset even when the house can be sold for only $200,000. “Asset” no longer has the positive connotation we usually assume, does it?
Another bank word is “capitalization”, which means, essentially, the bank’s own money, not the money in our bank accounts. Contrary to what I have heard, the government does not destroy a bank’s capitalization. A bank loses money when it loans money to someone who does not pay it back, the bank pays more for something than what it is worth, or they don’t keep their expenses in line, say, by perhaps paying their executives too much. All of these things are terribly foolish, especially for a banker, who is supposed to know all about money.
In 1999, Congress caved into bank lobbyists and repealed major portions of the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933 during the Great Depression to protect our bank accounts. For the last eleven years, banks have had unprecedented freedom to gamble with our money.
The theory was that the free market would reward the wise banks and punish the foolish. The reality was that banks created phony products like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that sliced and diced their mortgages beyond recognition and then sold them back and forth to each other. They just got richer and richer until the whole thing fell apart in 2008. They came to the U.S. government and said the world economy would collapse unless taxpayers paid back the money they had taken from our bank accounts and squandered.
This is serious. Banks are right back to the same game because Republicans in Congress are refusing to restore any serious regulation, the kind that worked from 1933 to 1999. Banks continue to make risky bets. Their charade reform is to curtail loans to homeowners and small businesses, the people who pay for their mistakes.
If you can’t put a paycheck in the bank, know what a dollar is really worth, and know that your money will be there when you want it, you aren’t going to be able to pay for a library or anything else. Speaking of which, let’s see—$172 million of taxpayer’s money to pay for CRB’s mistakes—that would have paid for 100 years, maybe 200 years of the library’s budget. Heck, in a good bank paying decent interest, the money we spent on CRB (and got nothing for) could have kept our library open forever with gobs of money left over.
Maybe we should be watching the banks instead of arguing about library volunteers. Call or write your representative and tell him if he does not support serious bank regulation you will never vote for him or anyone like him again.
Joel Spinhirne has lived in the Hood River Valley since 1993.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)