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Barely 72 hours later, it seems that Bank of America’s decision to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards is rapidly becoming a New Coke-level blunder. Consumers have taken to the blogosphere in droves to vent their displeasure, and the bank’s already-battered stock dropped by more than 3.5 percent on Friday.
Bank of America’s website was plagued with glitches through most of the day on Friday, and bloggers report continued sporadic outages throughout the weekend.
(NEW YORK) — Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other issues in New York City are dressing as corporate zombies and greeting Wall Street workers as they head into the office.
Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the group, says Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are being urged to dress in business wear with white faces and blood, and will march while eating monopoly money. He says financial workers should see them "reflecting the metaphor of their actions."
As the political world awaits his decision, Chris Christie has been keeping a close counsel of family and a small group of trusted advisors. I have been told to expect his decision within days — but nothing more specific than that.
Two top Republican donors — people who would be called into action to help with the herculean task of raising the money Christie would need to mount a campaign on such short notice — tell me they have heard nothing from Christie. As one emailed this afternoon, “Major donors are teed up, but still no word.”
Ever wonder the secret to staying happily married? Why some people make it look so easy, while you're feeling like you're in a struggle for your life? A new book,The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What it Really Takes to Stay Married rounds up a diverse cast of happily married characters who have the tenacity and audacity to make their marriages work.
We sat down with the book's author, Iris Krasnow, who calls her book "an antidote for divorce" and asked her to spill her own secrets of wedded bliss.
Want the inside scoop on the supercommittee? Ask a lobbyist.
Reporters and government watchdog groups are up in arms over the secrecy surrounding the committee, tasked with cutting at least $1.2 trillion from the nation’s deficit, which has met more frequently in secret than publicly and has rejected calls to disclose its donors and post its documents online.
MoreThe decision by Bank of America to charge $5 debit-card fees has peeved hordes of customers, prompting a wave of online tirades and a continued flight to local credit unions.
"I've been meaning to dump my Bank of America account for a credit union for quite some time, but my laziness has kept me from doing it," one man wrote on Facebook.
"So, thank you BOA for introducing the $5 per month fee to use my debit card, that's enough motivation to finally free myself from your evil grip."
A day after the country's largest bank announced its debit fee cards, Washington's largest credit union said its branches were bustling. BECU spokesman Todd Pietzsch couldn't say for sure if the activity was due to Bank of America's news, but said the credit union was on track to break a record in new memberships Friday.
MoreFederal banking regulators relaxed the November 2009 repayment criteria only weeks after they were established, bowing at least in part to a desire to ramp back the Government’s stake in financial institutions and to pressure by institutions seeking a swift TARP exit to avoid executive compensation restrictions and the stigma associated with TARP participation. The large financial institutions seeking to exit TARP were notably persistent in their efforts to resist regulatory demands to issue common stock, seeking instead morecreative, cheaper, and less sturdy alternatives that provide less short- or long-term loss protection than new common stock. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC, for example, requested expedited repayment, but each institution balked at issuing the amount of common stock required by regulators.
In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.
GEORGETOWN, Del. - State police say a Maryland woman pulled a gun on her husband during an altercation at a baseball complex in Georgetown.
Police say 42-year-old Merri Wagner of Salisbury works as a security guard at the Sports on the Beach complex. She was arguing there with her 47-year-old husband Saturday afternoon when police say Wagner pulled a handgun and pointed it at him.
The bodies of a man and woman were found Saturday morning in Patapsco Valley State Park, police said.
The young adults appeared to have committed suicide, said Sgt. Art Windemuth, spokesman for the Maryland Natural Resources Police.
SORKIN: Do we think about the–Not to be so America-centric, but do we think that the whole Wall Street protest is overdone, real, not real? Were there really a lot of people down there? Were there a lot? I could never tell.COHOST: Well uh they arrested 80 people. Right?SORKIN: Right. But I dont know if that was like all 80 of them.
SYCAMORE, Ill. – A 71-year-old Washington man accused in the 1957 kidnapping and killing of a 7-year-old Illinois girl has been charged in a separate case with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl from the same small town.
Illinois State Police announced the grand jury indictment of Jack McCullough on Friday but didn't say when the sexual assault happened. He was indicted this summer on felony murder, kidnapping and abduction charges in the death of Maria Ridulph of Sycamore.
NEW YORK - Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other grievances were maintaining a presence in Manhattan's Financial District Sunday even after more than 700 of them were arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in a tense confrontation with police.
The group Occupy Wall Street has been camped out in a plaza in Manhattan's Financial District for nearly two weeks staging various marches, and had orchestrated an impromptu trek to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. They walked in thick rows on the sidewalk up to the bridge, where some demonstrators spilled onto the roadway after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway, police said.
