I know I've taken some $wipe$ at her because of the eliti$m and it's just like attacking your own mother and women, but if I $ay I'm $orry with a purcha$e everyday will that make it a wonderful world?
I mean, I'm not even really complaining anymore and hardly critici$ing. I'm just recogni$ing wheat is before me and for whom it's written.
"Banking executives get lots of help with housing" by Shirley Leung | Globe Staff May 14, 2014
Here’s how absurd the Massachusetts housing market is: Millionaire banking executives need shareholders to help pay for their posh pads.
Last year, Citizens Bank spent $131,031 so Robert D. Matthews Jr., its head of commercial banking, could stay at a corporate apartment in Boston, according to filings released this week as the company prepares to go public and make even more money. He was holed up at the Mandarin Oriental, but kind of roughing it, actually. The executive’s accommodations didn’t even offer penthouse views.
I’m not sure why Matthews couldn’t pay for the place himself. He wasn’t exactly scraping by. With a base salary of $750,000, and all the other goodies the bank threw at him, including a bonus and stock awards, he took in a tidy $2.2 million.
Think about that next time you open a $1,000 CD at Citizens that’s earning 0.05 percent interest.
Maybe you want to think about this, too.
His boss, Bruce Van Saun, arrived last fall from the parent company, Royal Bank of Scotland, and received a housing allowance of $252,269. If you think Boston is pricey, try the United Kingdom, where Van Saun was living. He was paid $5.7 million last year, and now calls New Jersey home, where shareholders don’t pay for the roof over his head.
Well, London is the land of the billionaires.
Citizens is based in Providence and runs the second biggest banking operation in Massachusetts after Bank of America. The papers it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in advance of an expected IPO serve as a reminder of what hasn’t changed since the global financial meltdown six years ago. All that urgent talk about fixing everything that is wrong with Corporate America has fallen to a whisper.
Along with any vestiges of the Occupy movement. We get political rhetoric for campaign consumption, paid for with millions and billions of dollars in mostly corporate and elite cash.
I enlarged what she said because I've been typing it for weeks if not months if not years: NOTHING has CHANGED and its all been back to bu$ine$$ as u$ual!!
Inflated salaries remain the norm, and lavish housing allowances for ex-pats are still de rigueur. Not just for bankers, but for the suits in corner offices everywhere.
They are perks that companies will tell you they need to keep top talent fat and happy. But enough is enough when banks keep raising their fees to make another buck off customers who are literally earning pennies on their savings.
What savings?
It's all gone, and I'm scared. Living on handouts and the grace of God.
Since 2008, the average monthly service fee on noninterest checking accounts has nearly tripled to $5.54, and the average ATM surcharge has surged more than 30 percent to $2.60, according to a national Bankrate.com study.
That may seem like small change to bank executives, but such fees matter to customers.
And that can really add up when you control raw materials and get a cut of every transaction.
But maybe the British should be even more outraged. Taxpayers had to bail out RBS for $70 billion, and that’s why the banking giant is spinning off Citizens to help pay off its debt to society.
She implies criminality (smile)!
As for the British, they are already outraged anyway, although I do wonder where did they think the $70 billion was going?
The housing allowance for Matthews, Citizens’ commercial banking guy, ran out in February and he has since completed his relocation from New York.
So who else can I pick on? Look no further than Santander, the Spanish bank that bought Sovereign and is now the third largest retail bank in Massachusetts.
Roman Blanco, the chief executive of its US operations, gets a $30,000 monthly housing allowance that helps pay for his $4.3 million town house in the Back Bay. His total compensation was $2 million last year, according to federal filings.
Nuno Matos, Santander USA’s managing director of retail banking, gets a $10,000 monthly allowance. He got paid close to $2 million last year.
Santander wouldn’t tell me why they need to pay executives to take on hardship assignments in Boston. Is our city really that much of a backwater compared with Madrid?
We all know the rea$ons why.
Now leave it up to the Canadians to carefully count their loonies (seriously, that’s what they call their money). Last year, TD Bank, whose parent company is based in Toronto, gave new US chief Mike Pedersen a housing allowance of about $600,000 to move his family from Toronto to Philadelphia. The costs included support for the sale of his home and temporary housing. Pedersen, who made about $4.5 million last year, does not receive an ongoing housing allowance.
Is there anything we can do about this? “Switch banks,” offers Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. “Neither customers nor shareholders are hostages.”
But we are. Hostage to the $y$tem of private central banking and its in$ane u$ury.
He’s right. We have a lot of choices, so do companies.
What goes up must come down (back to the $tatu$ quo).
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Related:
Homes are Part of a Healthy Economy
The Boston Globe is No Longer Home
It is where my heart used to be, but as you can see from the paucity of posts of questionable quality, kind of a no now. It's all fiction in one form or another, fabricated outright or distorted beyond description so why bother?
"Citizens Bank IPO could be one of the largest this year" by Deirdre Fernandes | Globe Staff May 13, 2014
The sale of Citizens Financial Group shares later this year is likely to rank among the largest initial public stock offerings of 2014 and to become the biggest commercial bank IPO in more than a decade, according to financial analysts.
Citizens, based in Providence, filed paperwork Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares in public stock markets and spin off from its beleaguered parent company, the Royal Bank of Scotland. Citizens has not specified how many shares it plans to offer or the expected price per share.
But RBS, based in Edinburgh, needs money from the sale to help repay British taxpayers for a $70 billion bailout of the bank during the global financial crisis of a few years ago.
I look at this IPO $*** as nothing more than a $cheme of thievery. Poor public $uckers while Wall Street in$iders profit. Nothing has changed.
With $122 billion in assets and 1,370 branches, Citizens dwarfs all other commercial banks that have launched an IPO offering since at least 2000, according to SNL Financial, a financial research firm in Virginia.
The largest bank to launch an IPO since SNL began keeping comprehensive records more than a decade ago involved First Republic Bank of San Francisco, which had $21.9 billion in assets when it completed its public offering in 2010. The bank, formerly a unit of Bank of America, raised more than $322 million in the stock sale.
Citizens, the 13th largest bank in the country, plans to sell about 25 percent of the company to shareholders this year and sell the rest by 2016. In SEC documents, Citizens said it anticipates raising $100 million in this offering, but that is likely a placeholder used to calculate filing fees. Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn., investment advisory firm specializing in IPOs, estimates that Citizens would raise $3 billion.
Several other Massachusetts banks have filed for IPOs this year, but most are small, mutually owned community banks converting to public companies.
Despite the IPO rush by banks and other companies, investors are getting skittish, said Kathleen Smith, a principal with Renaissance.
At the same time the market-propping Fed printing pre$$es are slowing down. Interesting timing.
**************
Citizens acknowledged in its filings that it faces challenges in getting a top price.
Uh-oh.
In March, the bank failed a test aimed at measuring how well financial institutions could weather a severe economic crisis.
In its review of Citizens, the Federal Reserve Board found that the bank suffered from serious shortcomings in how it set aside money to get through deep recessions and that it had weak internal controls.
“If the bank hasn’t gotten a clean bill of health, it’s going to affect the price,” said Richard Bove, an analyst with Rafferty Capital Markets, based in Garden City, N.Y. “It’s a significant negative.”
Then the feeling I'm getting about this IPO is that it is a desperate grab for capital, if you will.
Maybe you could take that home with you.
While Citizens has said that it is well-capitalized and its extensive branch network in the Northeast should attract investors, the bank added there are potential costs to separating from RBS.
I didn't get a "but," but that is what that means. It's a gamble!
The bank will likely have to spend $51 million to rebrand and become a stand-alone company, a process it says could also drive away customers. The bank could also receive fewer referrals from RBS, Citizens said in its SEC filings.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has owned Citizens since 1988, when it was a small Rhode Island institution. RBS saw Citizens as a way to get a foothold into the lucrative US market and helped finance its aggressive push into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Midwest.
Citizens, however, has been shrinking in deposits in recent years, even as many other banks have grown.
That's not good! People withdrawing those savings to live?
In the past, Citizens downplayed its parentage across the Atlantic and emphasized that decisions were made locally. But that became more difficult after British taxpayers took over majority ownership following the bailout.
Good thing they don't have a homeless problem in Britain. If they did I would have read about it in my Globe.
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Related: Citizens Bank files plans to start its spinoff from RBS
Looks like the IPO is the place to be, 'eh?
"Alibaba hires former treasury official" New York Times May 13, 2014
NEW YORK — The Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group said Monday that it has hired James Wilkinson, formerly a senior official of the Treasury Department, as its head of international corporate affairs.
The hiring comes as Alibaba moves toward a stock market listing in New York, a global coming out of sorts for the company.
Wilkinson, known as Jim, was most recently at PepsiCo.
Well, Yahoo for Jim!
He will be in charge of building out Alibaba’s international corporate affairs operation. Wilkinson joined PepsiCo in 2012 from the Brunswick Group, a communications firm.
He is perhaps best known for his work as the chief of staff for then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., serving in that role during the financial crisis.
He also previously served as a senior adviser to Condoleezza Rice while she was secretary of state.
WOW!
He is one of Alibaba's 40 thieves.
And think about that for a minute: we are raised with the idea of a piggy bank being good (and $ad to $ay, the $y$tem is infe$ted with you-know who's, rhymes with) and being told a fairy tale about a thieving Arabs)
It is that government and international experience that Alibaba hopes to benefit from in its growing role as an Internet giant.
Alibaba's lobbyists?
“As Alibaba extends our platform for entrepreneurs and small businesses around the world, it is important that we have the right people in place who have a track record of building bridges across geographic boundaries,” Jack Ma, Alibaba’s cofounder and executive chairman, said in a statement.
“Jim is a proven team builder and leader in global corporate affairs with a strong track record of integrity, passion and commitment that reflect the Alibaba values,” said Joseph Tsai, Alibaba’s vice chairman.
Look who he worked for!
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Time for me to get to work here.
