BANK
VERSE
(A public service from your American Banker.)
Activist:
n. Individual who publicly questions
the American banker's best intentions while maintaining that a sound banking
system serves the common good.
Balance: n. What you still have to spend.
(See Notional)
Cause
Marketing: n. Corporate self-promotion
in tandem with socially meaningful causes, e.g., World Cup USA '94 or the
Statue of Liberty Centennial, in order to enhance consumer relations. Studies
suggest that this tactic is most influential with the most influential and/or
educated. (See Activist)
CRA: n. Community Reinvestment Act, a burden
imposed on the compliant American banker by Washington policymakers so that
the latter can appear outraged by the former's inability to serve neighborhoods
that either will only be caught dead in.
Derivatives:
n. (See Notional) (1) Volatile investments
shrouded with such titles as swaps,
options, and futures, by means of which the American banker exotically wagers federally
insured deposits in order to eliminate (the American banker's) risk. (2) Integral
components of this decade's pyramid scheme.
EBT: n. Electronic Benefits Transfer, a
process through which social service recipients and taxpayers reward the
American banker and those leading the
current revolution in government for,
among other things, making
economic relations appear less insensitive to human suffering.
Efficiency
Ratio: n. (From the Latin, efficere, to produce; ratio, reason) (1) Relation between the costs of running a
bank (i.e. the branch, the technological framework, the human resources) and
gross revenue; profitability. (2) Relation between the unessential and the
e$$ential.
Equity: n. What's left over when the American banker is done and gone.
Fed: n. (See Underserved) (1)
Over served. (2) Regulatory agency
peopled by wealthy Americans (usually former American bankers) who are well-paid
to keep the overt activities of (current) American bankers within the boundaries
of the law. (3) American banker and his/her friends and family.
Market
Driven: adj. Having or motivated by a compulsive need
to promote unneeded products/services until they become necessities.
Mystery
Shoppers: n. Bogus consumers
who clandestinely investigate the American banker's hirelings for discriminatory
and/or dishonest practices. The American banker deems such investigations
unethical, if not illegal. (See Self Regulation)
Notional:
adj.
Unreal; existing in the mind only;
phantasmagoric, as in notional value.
Observer: n. Usually unnamed but reliable source who soberly rationalizes
the exploits of the American banker; a nonactivist.
POS: n. Point Of Sale, where the consumer pays up with a debit card
so that funds can be repossessed by the American banker in real time. (N.b. In mathematics, location is a point's
sole property; in economics, property is a location's sole point.)
Psychographic
Profiles: n. Scientific classification
and use of human conscious-ness before the subject humans can classify or
use it themselves. These profiles are developed and analyzed to provide service.
Rightsizing: n. (1) Liberating fellow human beings from the senseless
drudgery of wage slavery. (2) Cutting
fat. (3) Helping the redundant recognize that they need a new start in life.
(See Efficiency Ratio)
Risk
Management: n. (1) Implementing and monitoring
incomprehensibly complex money-making schemes in order to store up for the
collapse that these same schemes will induce.
(2) Calculating the quantity of life.
Self
Regulation: n. (1) Absence of
conflict despite the inconsistency between one's stated beliefs and one's
actions. (2) Free marketeering.
Service: n. Doing unto others for a rightful
fee.
Thrift: n. Unfailing, scandal-free euphemism
for the tainted moniker Savings & Loan.
Unbanked: n. Illiquid individuals (estimated at 31 million strong in the US) who never
have enough to warrant the American banker's services. The bulk of these types
now pay exhorbitant fees for service
at check cashing houses. In the
cashless utopia they'll be served with EBTs
through the American banker, after paying more reasonable and more frequent
fees, and will never legally spend a penny that the
American banker cannot trace.
Underserved: n. (1) Huddled masses. (2) One with so little money that even the
American banker can't serve it. (3) Parolee.
(4) Undeserving.
