@exindy from a credit card account I paid off and closed last month.
Strange times, indeed!

it's because I've been dealing with a serious attack on my finances. And it isn't some nigerian prince wanting cash. It's a very sophisticated system.

I won't go into the details of the attack, nor will I relate how I dealt with it. My bank was very much involved and without their checks and balances and my paranoia it could have been very bad.

The key was malware that had contaminated Chrome. The contamination involved a link inserted into Chrome that appears valid but isn't. Something like... check your credit rating button. The malware intercepts the valid link and does some nasty then passes off to a valid function. In order for this to work the bad guy has to know the web page. Over the last few weeks I had been noticing some anomalies in the Chrome operation, repainting a screen when it wsn't necessary, etc. Basically the malware was intercepting and waiting for me to go to my bank account.

The key to the thing was email. What very much looks very valid... like a credit monitoring company that I would usually check alerting me to a breach. Ie, log in and check your account or just use our button and get in without the extra step. BTW, that button works. It just shoves the intercept into chrome first.

In order to work that email would have to know what agency I use and what bank I use. It would also have to know what email I use, etc. My wife gets them also, even tho she has different accounts and different email user ids.

I just got another one late yesterday but this time I thought first... ie, the only way an authorized user can be added to my bank accounts is by filling out a form with ID in front of a manager at a branch location. It cannot be done online.

Getting pretty scary these days.

@smiley7

interests do not coincide with ours. From a certain perspective it is arguably one of their greatest victories.

As most of you know, one of Clinton and the Third Way's largest mistakes.

be well and have a good one

"Glass-Steagall, Glass-Steagall, Glass-Steagall!" How many times have i written about Glass-Steagall over the past two decades, As most of you know, one of Clinton and the Third Way's largest mistakes. For sanity's sake just re-adopt the damn act and end this combo of commercial and investment banking once and for all.

Hapy to see you are still gardening and hope you've been well.

@on the cusp

exactly that, writ large, on a daily basis now. The camel's nose has long since come into the tent, and that SOB is laying down on top of us even as we speak.

depositors, where is the incentive for the banksters to stop their massive fraud? Won't that incentivize them to invent new and exciting fraudulent practices?

@The Liberal Moonbat

The huge derivative exposure in banking is a concern. You can explore bank exposures at particular institutions HERE. Coupled with info on assets and total deposits one might be able to arrive on some sort of overall assessment of risk, but that is certainly well beyond my capabilities.

The largest banks (aka too big to fail) have the comfort of previously being bailed out, have huge derivative risk but the expectation of more bailouts. Smaller banks (the runts) will likely be culled in any major outbreak of ‘runs’, since their cash reserves are quite small relative to total deposits.

Our economy has become a complete act of faith. ‘In God We Trust’? WTF is that even supposed to mean?

...is that I saw someone say this was part of a plot (or at least is a perfect crisis to exploit) to destroy SMALL banks/credit unions (I bank with a credit-union, and that's been a much-needed vent for personal terror over this issue).

Would anyone know more details about this?

@ovals49 One moment of distraction, whatever. My fault. Totally. Got complacent and paid in embarassment and inconvenience. I used to pride myself on being able to "feel" things which were not as they seemed. Pride goeth before a fall.

I agree with you on the fiat currency. The fed got way ahead of themselves, dancing in the booming investment business, converting pretend abstract(?) value into hard cash. For example, how much was the warehousing and distribution system in Sears actually worth? Moneywise? Maybe some buildings, some land, etc. But its real value was the people that made it work, the expertise, the loyalty, the dedication. What is that worth?

The whole business school model puts a dollar value on those things and then plays with the monopoly money. All of a sudden our economy has to make good when the pink slip is handed over between corporations. And so it just prints some more. GDP, hooray! And it gets even worse when the takeover uses a loan against the company that's being stolen to fund the theft.

I read a good article a few years back that I agreed with. Unfortunately it's in the Guardian but there's truth to it.

Why we should bulldoze the business school

There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years
by Martin Parker

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.

Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school

And this current "crisis"... print more money to cover the fake value.

something like financial ‘Russian roulette’. It’s always a good idea to use known links (I.e. bookmarks) to access any known financial or commercial businesses that I conduct business with, rather than clicking on the ‘convenient’ button in an email. Scammers have become rather good at designing imposter emails.

However, the biggest scam operation in the US is currently being run by our own government. One can no longer bite one’s gold coins to confirm the reality of their intrinsic value. Fiat currencies are faith-based facsimiles of a medium of exchange. The digital printing presses are run whenever it is convenient for government to pay an obligation to a creditor or fund budget shortfalls or deal with emergencies. The real scam isn’t so much the taxes that government impose on the population, rather it is the the devaluation of the fiat currency through deficit budgets and unfettered growth of the money supply.

Runs on banks happen when the public begins to realize that all of their savings are backed by nothing but their misplaced trust in an imaginary symbol of value that a reckless government created and the banks subsequently abused.

Expect the angry mobs to be blamed rather than those actually responsible.