Exit from Reality?/Tombarnes2008/flickr/Creative Commons
I discovered a new investment category, it’s called Profitable Busting. In some ways it is similar to Profitable Charity. It turns an act on its head, and it happens when a bank goes belly up.
How can that be? How can charity be profitable? It’s impossible, unless you’re a believer of some sort of course. Then charity counts toward your after-life’s meter or just makes you feel better for the good deed you’ve just done. But as far as making money while giving it away….not even our Lord, who had not a problem in multiplying fishes and loaves, could do it.
Profitable busting it’s what you get to do if you’re a bank or a banker, and it may be even more rewarding than multiplying aquatic life. Take Citi for example. It went bust. It needed 45 billion form the Federal Government to plug the hole it had driven into its balance sheet, now Citi si poised to collect more than 1 billion tax credit from Uncle Sam, and it has repaid just about nothing of the money it got. And Citi is not alone also J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo will receive a tax break due to losses they registered in 2009. In Wells case we’re actually talking about more than 8 billion profits, but hey Wells had some losses while absorbing Wachovia Bank and so now they’ll enjoy a 4 billion tax rebate. And that’s not all. While unemployment keeps growing–albeit much more slowly than before–throughout the economy, the only area where employment is growing is in the banking sector. In the meantime bankers on Wall Street are flying high again. Some news-media report that helicopters flights between New Jersey and Wall Street have resumed. For $100 each way busy bankers can fly again above the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike and jams at the Manhattan Tunnel.
Paolo Pontoniere is a Neapolitan Journalist, who has been living in California for years and writes for major Italian media. Paraphrasing Charles V of Bourbon he would say that his interests curiosity never rests.
From Stones to sex, from science to conscience, from politics to pandemics, he follows with equal passion all events of which it is worth telling a story. Twists and turns of life led him to become an economic reporter, but as it happened with the Che, it was all due to a misunderstanding.
When his editors at the time asked during an editorial meeting if anybody knew anything about the economy he said yes, but he meant to say that to survive he didn’t need much. You see it was one of those artsy copy offices, full of practitioners of experimental arts; dreamers who breathed big ideas, had high minded ideals and lived on nothing else but sandwiches and cigarettes. Now things are different though. To live and work in Baghdad By the Bay one needs serious money, and he says, he too now understands the real Economy.
