While listening to Nancy Pelosi talk during the bipartisan meeting on health reform, I came up with the ultimate solution to health care reform. I won’t take all of the credit for it, it was mostly Nancy’s idea.
Ms. Pelosi wants to pass new legislature so that everybody can have access to health care. Not just healthcare, but better healthcare. The new health reform will lower costs, increase accessibility and increase performance. This is great. I didn’t realize that all of this can happen with the stroke of a pen. Capitalism and the markets are totally unnecessary… And that’s when it hit me.
If she can just legislate the way to better healthcare, she should start at the heart of the problem. Don’t mandate healthcare for everybody. Mandate away the need for healthcare at all. Mandate an end to cancer. That’s right, make it impossible to get cancer, with the stroke of a pen. Not just cancer, mandate away diabetes and obesity and heart disease and asthma and osteoporosis and depression and AIDS. Once we’re legislated our way out of all of these health problems, we’ll be in great shape. Then we can start getting into the more exciting things. Legislate my ability to fly. Legislate my ability to have mind control. Oh, and legislate the end to war and famine.
Thanks.
Tags: Health Care, Politics
According to the Citibank’s client manual (see the last paragraph on page 23),
Withdrawal Notice
We reserve the right to require seven (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking, savings and money market accounts. We currently do not exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past.
After receiving a lot of attention online, Citibank confirmed the notice with the following comment:
When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future.
While Citibank claims to have no plans to enforce this rule, its good to know that it exists.
Tags: Banking
Here’s an update on my previous post on bank failures.
Since the end of October there have been 40 more bank failures (9 in November, 16 in December and 15 in January).
With 15 bank failures in January, it’s still too early to tell if we’ll break 2009’s record of 144 failures, but my money is on yes! We might even break the 181 bank failures of 1992. Going any further back isn’t a fair comparison because multi-branch banking wasn’t nearly as popular.
6 month trend
Although there was a small drop in the 6-month trend in January, the trend is still upward.
Failures by state
Georgia (34), Illinois (26), California (24) and Florida (24) combined now account for a slight majority (51% or 108/212) of bank failures across the country.
Tags: Banking, Recession
