I use a credit card that gives me 1% back. Its the right thing to do for us. Every little bit helps. The CC is paid off every month. I used to use my debit card for gas and groceries but due to the security issues with the debit card and the 1% back on the CC, I only use the debit to get cash. $100 lasts a very long time.
We still are having fuel shortages in my area. Last Thursday was the first time I had trouble getting diesel. Two places were out. Thankfully the third station had fuel. They had been out since you could see the remains of the out of fuel sign on the pump.
They have a credit card that give 10% back for some period of time and then 5% there after. Have to check the fine print though. Hopefully, in the next few weeks we will eventually make a trip and return with a 285 gallon fuel tank.
Which does save me some money and I have lots of fuel at the house and a much wider time period to find fuel.
Its been interesting watching the Congress Critters react to the financial crisis. This mess is very much of their making. In 2003 less than 8% of the loan were subprime. In 2006 over 20% were subprime. Barney Frank blocked oversight/overhaul legislation. Mr. Franks boyfriend at one point was one of the guys in charge of one of the Fannies.
Schumer said the three page bill to get out of this mess would not turn into a Christmas tree. Meaning that everyone would NOT hang their pork on the tree. Given the bill went to over 400 pages its one big XMAS tree. Both sides should hanging from the tree as a result.
Some of the mess, is as usual, from unintended consequences. One of the results of Enron seems to be the use of the accounting rule called Mark to Market. Hopefully one of our CPA's can explain this better and/or correct my understanding. What I have read is that Mark To Market is like having a house on Galveston Island that is worth 100K in August. Then Ike starts to get close. How much is the house worth? Who is going to buy the house while Ike gets closer and closer. At some point the value of the house in the Market is 0 since nobody is going to buy the house. So the bank would have to mark the assest as a 0. Even though the house does have value but for the short term it has no value.
The rules apparently are making these big firms mark the assest values as a zero. The assest may not sellable on a particular day or even a week or more. But is its value really 0? At some point, even if the house was wiped away by Ike the land would have some value not 0. But the rules are forcing a valuation of 0.
Course this stuff is as clear as deep black mud. One of the items that made it into the recently passed recovery bill was an increase of coverage amounts by the FDIC from 100K to 250K. That seems to be nuts. Supposedly one of the reasons that the S & L crisis was so bad during the 80's was the increase the coverage amounts to 100K. It puts the G'ment meaning US on the hook for more money.....
On the other hand,
, Wachovia's problems a weekend or so back was at least partly due to a silent run on the bank. Joe Six Pack was not withdrawing his money but companies were since if Wachovia went under they might not be able to get to their money. Thus they would not be able to pay their bills, meet payroll, etc. Some of the companies pulled out all of their money ABOVE 100K. So maybe pushing up the limit to 250K would help? Who knows.
Then there is the whole derivitive issues. Not sure anyone really understood those things. They might understand the idea but I don't think people understood the consequences when things went bad. Warren Buffett got his companies out of using derivitives which says something.
Executive pay has been an issue for decades. One of the reasons for pushing stock options was to give Executives some ownership of the company so they would no strip the company of value. Take the money and run type of thing. Employees were able to buy stock at reduced prices because of this law. Then the stock options got abused by the suits. The law was changed so that the stock options had to be on the books to try to stop the option abuse. As a result I no longer buy stock from my company because its just not worth the investment. Better places for me to park the money.
Later,
Dan
