ON SECOND THOUGHT: We just stumbled upon a great post by Hilary Stockton over at the TravelSort blog on how to turn credit card denials and deferrals into approvals. Not only does she go through all the ins and outs of exactly what to say to the banks when you’re trying to get them to change their mind, she lists the phone numbers to call for all the major issuers. It’s great advice, here’s a sample:
5. Have good reasons for applying for the new card: “I really like the current bonus mile/point offer” is NOT a good reason. Some good reasons could be:
- The no foreign transaction fee is important to me, as I do a lot of international traveling, and/or buy things from foreign-based companies that would otherwise incur foreign transaction fees
- The EMV Chip is important to me, since I travel internationally and have run into situations where my magnetic stripe card doesn’t work (Hyatt Visa)
- The 2x points for dining is such a great benefit, since I dine out a lot / entertain clients often (Chase Sapphire Preferred)
- I travel frequently and the 3x points for airline spend is a great fit for my needs (AMEX Premier Rewards Gold)
- I’m planning a number of trips with [Airline X] because [I’ve moved and Airline X offers more nonstop flights from here / I’ve decided I prefer Airline X for __________]
- My spouse/friend has this card and highly recommended it to me
Read the whole thing here.
SHOCKING REVELATION ABOUT GOLDMAN SACHS: Michael Lewis has been one of the finest financial writers out there for a few decades now. So we were glad to see him review the book by Greg Smith, the ex-Goldman employee who wrote the notorious NYT op-ed piece last year claiming that Goldman Sachs bankers–sit down before you read this–are primarily interested in money.
We greatly enjoyed Smith’s piece when it came out, though we wondered what his motives for writing it were. After all, he did spend 10 years at Goldman, and you don’t stay there for ten years without having a certain cunning.
Happily, Michael Lewis is in top form. Here you go:
In the end, the reader puts down Why I Left Goldman Sachs a little mystified. Why exactly did Greg Smith leave Goldman Sachs? What did he hope to achieve? If it’s change he is after, his particular story comes too late. If, say, back in 2004, someone such as Greg Smith had stepped forward and explained to the world what was going on inside Goldman, he might have spared us all a lot of pain and trouble. But today’s insider confessions feel like vain and useless acts. And what would he have us do, four years after the Great Collapse, to fix the system, or to change in any way his former employer’s behavior? The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren’t intent on anything except short-term profits: they’re insensible. If anyone attempted to seize control of one of these strange machines and impose upon them a clear moral direction, the machine would hit its own button and he would be ejected.
Why indeed. But the best part of all is Lewis’s summary of what’s happened and how Smith’s book relates to it all:
Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all. And after all this has been done, a Goldman Sachs employee steps forward to say that the people at the top of his former firm need to see the error of their ways, and become more decent, socially responsible human beings. Right. How exactly is that going to happen?
Magical thinking, indeed.
CORNERING THE MARKET IN NORWEGIAN DIAPERS: Today’s odd gaming-the-system story of the day: price competition in the Norwegian diaper market has become so intense that eastern European shoppers have been driving there, buying thousands of dollars worth of diapers, and reselling:
Some have been stopped with diapers worth up to 50,000 crowns ($9,100), roughly 80,000 diapers, a legal shipment even though Norway is not part of the European Union.
“They told us that the only reason they came to Norway was to drive around and buy diapers to bring back home and resell,” Breilid said.
(H/T: Fatwallet Finance)
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