And you are here why?

via The Guardian , here is a very nifty map showing the distribution of ATMs worldwide . Surprisingly, Brazil and Russia have the most ATMs per person, w/ Brazil having the most ATMs of any country. And then, of course, there are any number of countries where ATMs barely exist. As they put it If you're unsure what an ATM is, there are three possible reasons why: 1) you're from one of the 66 countries where there still aren't any 2) you didn't know that it stands for Automated Teller Machine 3) you're from one of the countries where these devices are known as ABMs (Automated Banking Machine) cash machines, cashpoints or holes in the wall Having 3 ATMs for every 1,000 adults though Moldova tops the street banking list in per capita terms. It's also the country to have experienced the most dramatic change in its ATM supply - as recently as 2004 it had one tenth the number it does now. Russia has also experienced a dramatic change with 1.5 ATMs per 1,0...

“The greatest triumph of the banking industry wasn’t ATMs or even depositing a check via the camera of your mobile phone. It was convincing Treasury and Justice Department officials that prosecuting bankers for their crimes would destabilize the global economy.” -Barry Ritholtz Source The Daily Beast

Matt Cameron has an article over at Risk (paywall. sorry...) about a weird side-effect of Dodd-Frank, viz., the requirements that (most) derivatives get cleared over the counter, said side-effect being that Banks are not accepting Pension-funds as clients. I know, you're probably hopping w/ excitement about this - but bear with me it is kinda interesting and does have some pretty serious ramifications.  To summarize • There is a lot of money in pension funds out there - around $10 trillion in the U.S . alone, and quite possibly double that worldwide . • In the U.S., pension funds are governed by ERISA , which has all sorts of fun rules involving what happens in case of bankruptcies (who gets what money, etc.) • Pension funds invest their money in all sorts of ways, everything from simple stuff - buying stock in company X - through Private Equity into Hedge Funds and finally at wacky complex derivatives, whatever.  Mind you, this is worthy of a post all unto itself, but...

Performed by the Austerity Allstars...

Interfluidity has a nifty writeup - " What is a bank loan ", which explains, in lucid prose, exactly what is sez, viz, what a bank loan is. Suppose I go to my local bank and ask for a loan. The bank says yes, and suddenly there is “money in my account” where there was not before. Am I now a “borrower” and the bank a “creditor”? No. Not at all. The transaction that has occurred is fully symmetrical. It is as accurate to say that the bank is in my debt as it is is to say that I am in debt to the bank. The most important thing one must understand about banking is that “money in the bank” also known as “deposits” are nothing more or less than bank IOUs. When a bank “makes a loan”, all it does is issue some IOUs to a borrower. The borrower, for her part, issues some IOUs to the bank, a promise to repay the loan. A “bank loan” is simply a liability swap: I promise something to you, you promise something of equal value to me. Neither party is in any meaningful sense a credi...

Most people have one of three perspectives on the FDIC U.N. sponsored gummint agency, that makes black helicopters for use by the Trilateral Commission Something to do with medicine approval? Something to do with regulating banks? If you ignore the Trilateral wingnuts, and the numb-nuts who mix the FDA and the FDIC up, you have the vast majority of people out there who realize that the FDIC has something to do with banks, but no real idea what. As it turns out, there is actually a perfectly valid reason for the existence of the FDIC - and it has to do with Banks, and Nash Equilibrium . To put it simply, a Nash Equilibrium is the equivalent of a self-reinforcing law, i.e., one that nobody has an incentive to break, despite the absence of a police force , because you end up worse off breaking it than if you don't. Or ask XKCD puts it "Huh? Whut?" " What on earth does the above have to do with the banks?" I'm glad  you asked. Consider ...

Bill Black had the following gem regarding Bank Fraud - referencing, in particular, the entertainment over the last ten or so years Bill Black’s Recipe for Bankers to become Billionaires:   1. Grow massively, 2. By making very poor quality loans at high rates of interest, 3. Use extreme leverage (high corporate debt), and 4. Set aside virtually no loss reserves for the massive losses that will be coming. If you do these four things, you are mathematically guaranteed to report record short-term income.   Akerlof and Romer   referred to it as a sure thing – it is guaranteed.  The context is really quite key - as he explains later - 1) Poor quality loans are, by definition, high risk loans, and as such command high interest rates 2) These high-interest rates mean that the bank, theoretically is getting back a tremendous return on investment 3) Profit!  Ok, short term profit, that is. In the long run, everything is going to hell in a handbasket, but th...

From the Consumerist Speaking to investors today, Todd Maclin, the bank's chief executive officer of consumer and business banking said that 70% of customers with deposits below that $100K line are not profitable for the bank after new regulations put a cap on lenders' fees. [...] "Lost revenue has to be replaced with higher share of wallet and customer penetration," Maclin explained. "You have to get your costs and where you spend your time, to the fullest extent possible, more in line with where the opportunity is." Aaaaargh! This isn't lost revenue that needs to be replaced .  This is revenue they should never have been making in the first place! . Just because they grew huge and fat based on ripping off people does not create some kind of embedded moral right to suck more money out of people! And yeah, I know, Free Market, yada, yada. Except that these are Banks , which are taking advantage of their privileged role in our capitalist ...

Barry Ritholz sez - Most of the World Wants More Bank Regulation : That is what survey after survey around the globe shows that the world’s populations wants. Despite a relentless propaganda campaign of misinformation, fabricated data and false narratives, the public has not been fooled by the 1%. The best efforts of a well funded group of ideologues — Free Market absolutists, anti-Democracy and Randians — these pro-corporate radicals has not yet succeeded in fooling all of the world’s population all of the time. How do we know this? A 25 country survey last year by Edelman. They asked the question: “ When it comes to government regulation of business, do you think that your government regulates business too much, not enough or about the right amount? ” ... One major caveat : I would imagine the major events of the past few years probably has people thinking of disasters in specific industries: Banking , Energy Exploration and Nuclear Power . If the questions were asked abo...

Der Spiegel is running an interview with Hilmar Kopper , former Deutsche Bank CEO. Its worth the read in entirety, and difficult to summarize, but Hilmar Kopper comes off quite well. There is much in what he says that I disagree with, but he does seem to have that rarest of values - integrity. Would that others in the financial industry had the same backbone.  Some choice quotes follow ( resentment toward your industry now extends into the upper classes. ) Since when is the upper class a benchmark of judgment? ( People don't die in the financial crisis .. ) .. but values do -- in every sense of the word.   Markets have a compensatory function. This doesn't mean that good behavior on the part of the players is automatically guaranteed. Unfortunately, the hope that people will behave with decency isn't always enough. The players need laws. Money needs laws (ed: emphasis mine). And laws are the responsibility of the state. It makes the rules, monitors compliance...