SOUTHWEST AIRLINES 50,000 OFFER IS BACK: Welcome back, Southwest Airlines 50,000 point sign-up bonus! This offer has been rotated in and out every few months for a couple of years now and it’s good to see it back as it’s a very good offer.
The timing is especially good as The Points Guy reminds us. You can get a companion pass after earning 110,000 points, and two sign-up bonuses would just about cover that. Once you qualify for the pass, it’s good through the remainder of the calendar year and the year after that. So if you time your spending right, you could bring along a friend for free on any Southwest trip through December 2015.
HOW TO NEGOTIATE A BROKERAGE RETENTION BONUS: Matt at Saverocity has an article on something that had never occurred to me before: negotiating a brokerage retention bonus. Has anybody else ever done this? According to the article, it doesn’t work all the time, but it does work at least some of the time.
HOW TO GET ALERTS FOR CHEAP AIRFARES: Frugal Travel Guy has some good suggestions here. Apparently it’s even possible to find mistake fares via fare alerts.
GAMING THE SYSTEM, WALL STREET STYLE: A lot of what passes for high finance these days is little more than gaming the system. Case in point: the recent ethanol credit debacle. The NYT reports:
It was supposed to help clean the air, reduce dependence on foreign oil and bolster agriculture. But a little known market in ethanol credits has also become a hot new game on Wall Street.
The federal government created the market in special credits tied to ethanol eight years ago when it required refiners to mix ethanol into gasoline or buy credits from companies that do so. The idea was to push refiners to use the cleaner, renewable fuel, or force them to buy the credits.
A few worried that Wall Street would set out to exploit this young market, fears the government dismissed. But many people believe that is what happened this year when the price of the ethanol credits skyrocketed 20-fold in just six months, according to an analysis of regulatory documents and interviews with more than 40 people involved in the market, including industry executives, brokers, traders and analysts.
I’d like to emphasize that the federal government was surprised by the fact that very smart, profit seeking bankers sought to game the system. Anybody who’s at all familiar with couponing, chasing credit card deals, and so forth wouldn’t be surprised, but apparently none of the powers-that-be are into that stuff.
So how’d the bankers do it?
Traders for big banks and other financial institutions, these people say, amassed millions of the credits just as refiners were looking to buy more of them to meet an expanding federal requirement. Industry executives familiar with JPMorgan Chase’s activities, for example, told The Times that the bank offered to sell them hundreds of millions of the credits earlier this summer.
If you’re not annoyed, read this:
But the activities, while legal, could have consequences for consumers. In the end, energy analysts say, the outcome will be felt at the gas pump — as the higher cost of the ethanol credits gets tacked onto the price of a gallon of gasoline. (The credits, which cost 7 cents each in January, peaked at $1.43 in July, and now are trading for 60 cents.)
If only there were some way for consumers to take back what JP Morgan Chase has stolen…
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