Pursuant to the overdraft reforms pressed by Congress, Regions Bank, a subsidiary of Regions Financial Corporation (RF) announced changes to its overdraft fee policies. It announced to overhaul the overdraft fees on consumers in case the account is overdrawn by less than $5 dollars. The bank also announced that it has limited the number of overdraft fees to no more than four per day. It would also offer “opt out" ability to customers who prefer that the bank decline or return any transaction on their account, whenever possible, when they are presented against insufficient funds. The bank would also provide customers with a number of overdraft protection options as well as account monitoring services through online, mobile, ATM and telephone banking. The changes will take effect during the first quarter of 2010. The changes follow U.S. congressional leaders' criticism of bank account fees and come ...

Pursuant with the overdraft reforms pressed by Congress, BB&T Corporation (BBT) announced changes to its overdraft fee policies. The company announced on Sept. 28, 2009 to overhaul the overdraft fees on consumers in case the account is overdrawn by less than $5 dollars. The bank also announced that it will limit the number of overdraft fees to no more than four per day. It would also offer “opt out" ability to customers who prefer that the bank decline or return any transaction on their account, whenever possible, when they are presented against insufficient funds. The changes will take effect during the first quarter of 2010. The changes follow U.S. congressional leaders' criticism of bank account fees and come as the banks digest rule changes for credit card fees. The law sharply restricts credit card issuers' ability to raise interest rates on existing balances, to charge certain ...

The Philosophy of Money: What It Means to Be Truly Wealthy

by Alexander Green, Oxford Club Investment Director

As a young man in my twenties, I worked as a stockbroker in a local firm. Before long I was earning a six-figure income. Then came the brand-spanking-new lakefront house, the ski boat, the Jaguar XJ-6, and all the other toys.

I saved virtually nothing. When my friends came over for parties - which were frequent - most of them assumed I was rich.

I was nothing of the sort, I hadn’t learned about the true philosophy of money.

Wealth is not the same thing as income. If you earn a lot of money and blow it every year, you’re not rich. You’re just living high.

Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you earn. And it certainly can’t be measured by what you spend.

How does the average person get rich?

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Back on 25th March, I wrote in regard to the Geithner toxic asset PPIP scheme that:br /emspan style=”font-family:georgia;”‘The key issue isn’t investor appetite, but bank reluctance to face up to the true market value of their portfolios; less than 20% is currently marked to market, the rest at par or marked to model. Will they really sell into auctions that will explicitly confirm the inadequacy of their capital positions and undermine the credibility of their internal risk models?’/span/embr /Well, now we have our answer; they won’t. Astonishingly, the Treasury is quietly shelving the PPIP scheme, hoping that $100bn of equity issuance (including the imminent Citi deal) and the boost to earnings from a steep yield curve and economic recovery will somehow be sufficient to bolster bank balance sheets.br /br /That looks quite unbelievably reckless to me, and pretty much guarantees another solvency crisis sooner rather than later. Of the ten …

Alex’s Notes: My favorite part of this article was this:

Bluffing Into the Nuts

We’ll close with a quick poker analogy.

In No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em, to hold “the nuts” means you can’t be beaten – that your hole cards in combination with the board give you the best possible hand.

Needless to say, it is useless to bluff a player who is holding the nuts. Why would they fold? They know they have the best hand. If you raise such a player, they will happily call… or better yet shove their own stack in the middle, a reraise to put you all-in.

If the Fed or the IMF were to dump gold onto the market in this environment, I believe it would be the poker equivalent of bluffing into the nuts. I don’t think the powers that be are that dumb.

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Written by Justice Litle, Editorial Director, Taipan Publishing Group  

Is

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Is there a Sword of Damocles hanging over gold’s head? Here’s why U.S. and IMF gold holdings aren’t as big a deal as some think…

Last week, I promised to answer this popular question:

“Hey JL, what about all that gold in the vaults of the IMF and Fort Knox? Aren’t you worried they might try to dump it on the market?”

But before we get to that, a quick correction. In Friday’s piece, Europocalypse, I made reference to Colonel Kurtz as a “deranged flyboy lost deep in the Congo.”

The film-buff contingent among you corrected me with relish. Kurtz was in Cambodia, not the Congo, at the height of the Vietnam War when the movie took place.

My apologies… in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is a rogue ivory trader lost in the Congo. (Conrad himself drew on personal experiences

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America is in a real pickle these days – but just how did we get here? Jim Amrhein reminds us, in signature pull-no-punches style, that the man who just left the White House had an eight-year hand in this mess…

“Farewell, fair cruelty.” – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Like the unceremonious dumping of a codependent spouse once a new lover has come of age, America’s mainstream media seems to have stuffed the entire George W. Bush presidency into a shoebox and crammed it into the back of history’s closet…

I guess this should come as no surprise. For better or worse, a new era of American leadership dawns. And it does not serve the architects of an emergent ethos and by “architects,” I mean the mainstream media — to glorify, or even acknowledge, the achievements of past leaders…

Especially when they’re Republican.

The

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With big bank bailouts dominating the news, there’s no better time to get the truth about bank safety.

This informative article has been excerpted from Bob Prechter’s New York Times bestseller Conquer the Crash. Unlike recent news articles that are responding to the banking crisis, it was published in 2002 before anyone was even talking about bank safety. However, you may find the information even more valuable today than ever before.

For even more information on bank safety, visit Elliott Wave International to download the free 10-page report, Discover the Top 100 Safest U.S. Banks. It contains details on how you can protect your money from the current financial crisis, updated for 2008.

Risks in Banking

Between 1929 and 1933, 9000 banks in the United States closed their doors. President Roosevelt shut down all banks for a short …