Coddling the 10 Percent

On May 15, 2012 · Leave a Comment

To reel in these mid-level richies, bankers are offering to pamper them lavishly.

Another way that the rich are different from you and me is that their bankers serve them freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

Jim_Hightower

The über-rich, of course, are used to such coddling, but now a class of customers that bankers have dubbed the “mass affluent” get cookies, too. Think you might qualify? You do… if you have a minimum of $500,000 to open one of these mass-affluent accounts. Otherwise, you fall into a category called “lower-margin” customers — so go get in the ATM line, Bucko.

This half-million-dollar-and-up bunch are not the 1-percenters. Instead they are the 10-percenters, and they’ve suddenly become hotly coveted by JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other big chain banks. To reel in these mid-level richies, bankers are offering to pamper them lavishly.

For example, rather than having to breathe the same air as the riff-raff, they get to bank in cushy, private lounges. The carpets are plush, the cookies fresh, and a nice touch of wine and cheese might be available. There are no lines and no tellers to deal with – instead, these affluent swells get “relationship managers” who cater to their banking needs, including being available after hours. And here’s something completely astonishing: one bank president says of her advantaged clients, “We’ll come to you. If you want us to meet you in your home on a Sunday, we’ll do that.”

The chain bankers are opening hundreds of these posh, new banking nests for the affluent in upscale neighborhoods across the country, even as they are feverishly inventing new fees and coldly shrinking services for you and me. It’s another move by the Powers That Be to wall off the good fortunes of the privileged few from even having to be in the same room as America’s non-affluent majority. Indeed, they’re creating their own exclusive America.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Comments are closed.

Looking for something?
New on bluetabletalk…
Quotable Quotes

The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius

“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…

Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van Heuvel
Read it on WP

Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers Pitt
Read it on Truthout
Recent Comments
- Diana on Is Your Bubbly Soap Making the Kids Sick?
- Bob HILL on Vocabulary for the New Millenium: Reconciling Independence with Interdependence
- Gerry Tatham on Alan Grayson. “Aaron Swartz, R.I.P.”
- Rabbi Stanley Howard Schwartz DD on Alan Grayson. “Aaron Swartz, R.I.P.”
- j j on SOTU 2013: Not a Game-Changing Agenda
Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?