The joys of loan-sharking, American style
As part of my quest to consume less electricity (in the land of Enron, electricity is very expensive; when our local power company was taken over by Enron, the floormats who call themselves the Oregon PUC let them crank the rates way up to help pay for the bribes administrative costs associated with the looting takeover. Along with the usual crop of electrical things in the house, I used to run about a dozen power-hungry PCs with a monthly power bill of between US$60 and US$80; these days we've gone down to three PCs, and our monthly bill has gone up to about US$105. Ugh) I ordered a couple of cheap wattmeters from Medusa.com Amazon.com last week. They arrived today, and along with the usual invoice and wad of packing materials, Amazon included a little advertising flyer from a large east coast bank I'll call Citibank, for that is their name.
Citibank has a Great! Offer! For! Homeowners! in that if you set up a home equity loan from them they'll give you a Free! iPod! nano! for Free! And it's Free! All you need to do is get a home equity loan from them!
It's got a few little conditions which are pretty awe-inspiring in the way they will screw you over if you're foolish enough to take them up on the deal. To get the (US$199 street price) iPod nano, you have to
- Sign up for a three year home equity loan, which costs US$50/year.
- Borrow a minimum of US$25000, at what they call "market rates."
- "market rates" are set to "a maximum of" 18%, which I read as being a minimum of 18%.
- And if you decide to settle the home equity loan early, they'll charge you US$500 to US$11,000 (US$23000 in New York state) "early closure release fee" for all the work they needed to do to dip you in boiling water and pluck all your feathers out.
What a deal, eh? To save US$200 on an iPod, you'll end up paying Citibank several thousand dollars more for a loan that you could get at a better rate from your local credit union.
You'd think they'd be ashamed of themselves, but that's not how American capitalism works; with the spiffy new screw the working classes bankruptcy law, there's a huge incentive for banks to dangle all sorts of worthless baubles out to catch the unwary, because once you're caught there isn't anything you can do to get away.
If I didn't know better, I'd say that they really want a socialist revolution to occur. Give it time; it's not as if the Evil Party is going to do anything to make life better for anyone other than the super-rich.
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Interesting……
We here in British Columbia willing submitted ourselves to former Enronite Ranger Richard Kinder when we recently sold him our formerly public natural gas company.
And guess what….they get the pipelines too….so now the greedheads are only millimeters away from getting their hands on the Alberta Oil Sands.
In fact, BigTime was all set to come up and celebrate just weeks ago before that pesky Katrina got in the way.
But we know it’s only a matter of time before he re-schedules.