Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Banking in America

I'm not one of those financial types or banking guys with the fancy suits and ties and highly-polished shoes, who know everything there is to know about banking and financial markets, like the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and how much the U.S. dollar is worth from minute-to-minute these days. I took Economics 101 in college, back when the formula for the Dow Jones thingy hadn't been all modified so that the Dow Jones Industrials Average could shoot up to 10,000 instead of linger around 1,000 and really mean something to some people because 10,000 is so much bigger than 1,000 and must, therefore, be a good thing; so, I guess I could fake it a little if I had to.

And I was around when Ronald Reagan was president and did hear of the Laffer Curve and still can't understand, as Bush the Lesser apparently does, how spending a lot more than you have and cutting the amount of money you bring in tax-wise can possibly be a good thing; but, as I said before, I took only Economics 101 that started at 8 in the morning and really can't speak to that kind of thing, except that an overdraft charge of $34 is arbitrary and has no basis in reality. But that's banking and economics. Bankers figure out a way to justify that kind of insanity.

By the way, Key Bank, which is supposed to be a big-ass bank, discovered that one of its banker guys with nicely tailored suits, shiny shoes, a $5.8 million house on Long Island, a girlfriend with a $1.2 million necklace, and a wife and kids in a $1.2 million dollar house, had stolen about $23 million over the past three years ... then he admitted in a signed confession filed in federal court that he'd been doing it, undiscovered by the bank, for 10 years. Do the math. And he started with Key Bank 11 years ago ... go figure.

Key Bank owns or leases the tallest building between New York and Chicago ... that would be the Key Bank Building in Cleveland. Despite its obvious presence in Cleveland, Key Bank is not the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns." A sign on the Cleveland Browns Stadium flashed to me this morning, along with the 39-degree temperature, that the Bank of America is the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns." That is a strange and puzzling phenomenon.

But I'm not adept at banking or economics, as I indicated to you previously. There are three Bank of America branches listed in the on-line phone directory in the Cleveland area. I tried to find two of them one afternoon when my presently-Florida-based sister-in-law, PJ, who doesn't own a freeze-dried dog, but did drive with a freeze-dried dog in a convertible down to North Carolina, was traveling and asked me to make a deposit into her Bank of America account, giving me her account number, apparently trusting that I wouldn't steal her identity.

With my lovely navigator-wife directing me, we headed down Broadview Road, south of the city into the outer reaches of suburbia. The address for the bank was right next to an empty warehouse. No bank. We figured the bank probably moved to the address on Edgerton Road, which was very close to the Broadview Road location, since nobody was answering the phone listed for Broadview Road. Well, there was no fucking bank anywhere near the Edgerton Road address, either. There was nothing near that address ... except for the par-5 meandering along the other side of the road. Not even a vacant warehouse.

Those addresses are actually where the Ohio Turnpike intersects and passes beneath those roadways; and the Bank of America "branches" are ATM machines at the Ohio Turnpike rest stops.

There are no live employees working for Bank of America in Ohio. There are no offices for the Bank of America in Ohio. Any Bank of America address in Ohio is for an ATM machine. The phone numbers are for ATM machine modems.

So, why did the Bank of America pay all kinds of money to be the "Official Bank of the Cleveland Browns?"

Posted by Bill at November 21, 2006 03:22 PM