Interest in Principles?

After hundreds of billions of bailout dollars and a litany of ensuing debacles, our banks are not the pride of the nation.  Bankers are more maligned than used-car salesmen, it seems.  Bank regulators have been completely overhauled and the aftermath of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won’t be written for…

Is Corporate Social Responsibility “hypocritical window-dressing”?

The New York Times ran an interesting story in the Business Section this weekend, titled, “First Make Money; Also Do Good.”  Basically, it argues that corporate philanthropy is small potatoes and corporate social responsibility not much more than disingenuous marketing (“hypocritical window-dressing” according to Milton Friedman).  Citing Harvard’s Michael Porter’s…

CUB Index YOY Beats S&P 500 by 24%

I’ve been tracking publicly traded underbanked companies for several years.  I’m dubbing this index the Core UnderBanked (CUB) Index.  It includes the Greendots, the Western Unions, the Cash Americas, the MetaBanks, and Rent-A-Centers of our industry.  Market caps vary from $10million to $10billion.  I’ve excluded retail banks, like BofA and…

Dynamic Accounts

Why is it that my search engine can anticipate what I’m going to search for after just a couple keystrokes, my music player can string together 1000 songs based on a couple preferences, and my car can adjust whether I like to go through a turn in second gear, but…