Daily Doozy - Nom de Trompeur

A Nom de Trompeur is an alias used for doing business, primarily used in deals on the shadier side.
Examples:

"The company's Chief Conscience Officer, aka I Can Live With That Guy, uses a nom de trompeur in all public communications."

"The tech services woman in Bangladesh, who trained in a midwestern U.S. accent for several months, uses the nom de trompeur 'Cissy from Cincinnati'."

"The signature on your bank's new 79 page TOS (terms of service) is a nom de trompeur."

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Get in Line Fast Fellas!

Bankers across the country are queued up (see image at left) to collect their 2009 bonus checks before the hicks in Flyover Country have a chance to do the math.

What's the bonus total this year? $50 billion? $60 billion? One of the majors alone has set aside $22 billion --- YES THAT'S A FREAKIN' B! for compensation for executive and other 'players' (to an average tune of $536,000 according to the New York Times).

OK, we'll be nice guys here and play it conservative. We'll call the total for the top ten around $80 BILLION BUCKS (which we really think is about 60% - 70% of what the actual total will be.)

What can $80 billion buy this day and age?

Well, lessee...

The TOTAL budget for the State of California (population 56 gazillion) is only $82.9 billion. The whole schmear. Of course they're light about $6.9 jumbo*, but maybe a couple of these bankers could give them nice little personal loans at, what, 23%?

Hmm... or $80 billion could bring a MILLION unemployed people back to work for a year with a total comp package (including health insurance) around $80,000 per.

How about cities? How about EIGHTY cities the size of Denver, Colorado?

Or a year's college tuition for 3,200,000 (yes that's 3.2 million) students.

These bankers are whining that they have to pay out this kind of money to retain quality people and a competitive edge.**

How much talent does it take to say, "just jack up the monthly fees on the credit cards, charge people a fee if they don't buy enough on credit, and generally screw our customers any way we can..." (watch for the caca coming down the pike in February, and make DAMNED SURE you're reading the fine print in ANYTHING you get from your bank or credit card company.

'nuf said.

*real financial talk for a billion dollars - of course nobody gives a rat's patootie about anything to the right of the decimal place.

**or to hire a bunks of psycho/sociopaths who can say "I can live with that" with the greatest of ease.

It's Quite Complicated, You See

"It's Quite Complicated, You See" is a common phrase used to blow smoke up the listener's arse in the following situations:

You could, of course, dump your dollars and pounds for gold in offshore accounts, but of course it's quite complicated, you see, to understand exactly how it all works.

Things would be a lot better of for all of us if American and Western European workers would be willing to take the same wages as, say, any other freakin' place in the world, but it's quite complicated, you see, to get them all to do that.

When we want to steal people blind with market manipulations, misstated revenues, under-reported expenses, and the like, we just tell them it's quite complicated, you see, far beyond your capability to understand.

Banking Holiday

n. (US,UK) Designated days during the year where bankers are given time off to fly huge amounts of currency out of the country, and can work on their "recordkeeping" without customers and regulators about.

Cayman

n. a place like Switzerland, only warmer, where drug dealers, investment bankers, and other low-life can squirrel away ill gotten gains without having to worry about things like disclosure or taxes.

As in:

Way back in the 16 or 17 hundreds, before Disney started making records, the Governor of the BWI (British West Indies) looked at the Cayman Islands. "Man, you can't grow crap here, not even Ganja like in Jamaica. How about if we build banks -- the tax free kind? We can hide all kinds of stuff from the King and then in the future, when the Americans have 401(k) plans, we can take a cut when our cousins swindle them away."

n. an entry-level German car.

As in:

The bonus Eddie got for screwing 100 people out of the money in their 1031 accounts wasn't enough for a Carrera 4, so he bought the aqua blue metallic Cayman.

v. to bundle large quantities of U.S. $100 bills in shrink-wrapped bails and transport them via private jet to the Cayman Islands for tax-free deposits.

As in:

When the second assistant to the head guy at Banco de Puerco heard that the SEC and Federal Reserve were breathing down his neck, he decided to Cayman the $112 million in cash he had been keeping in a vault in his Connecticut basement.