When you try to open an account at Wells Fargo, they work up a customer "profile" and try to figure out how to sell you every financial instrument under the sun, from company loans and house loans to higher fee checking accounts. And that's all before they take your fingerprint, which is now apparently required at all Wells Fargo branches (thumbprint, actually, which sounds less incriminating than "fingerprints").
Personally, I would never do business with Wells Fargo. But a lot of people certainly do, and Wells Fargo's profits are only exceeded by the rising personal debt and bankruptcies of American families. There's a whole lot of money leaving the hands of hard working American families, and much of it is heading straight into the coffers of the largest banks (who seem to rake in extraordinary profits whether the economy is good or bad).
A lot of the money loaned to customers as home mortgage loans, it turns out, isn't used to buy homes. In many cases, customers are cajoled into taking out new loans on their homes in order to refinance credit card debt. After a few months of spending on the balance-free credit cards, they're back into credit card debt and the banks own their homes, too. How's that for customer service?
Home loans are already dishonest enough to start with -- they're designed so that your first few years' payments hardly touch the principal. You've paid $10,000 over the last year and still don't own more than a couple hundred dollars worth of equity. To market home mortgages to people as a way to pay off their credit card debt is extremely irresponsible.
There's far too much predatory lending going on these days. By and large, banks aren't really interested in helping their customers, they're simply interested in bilking them out of a few more dollars each month. That's why American workers are dubbed "wage slaves" by the people in the know. It's the illusion of financial freedom in a system that keeps siphoning your hard earned cash, day after day, year after year, until the day you die. And then you get to pay for that, too.
About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and award-winning journalist with a passion for teaching people how to improve their health He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he is well known as the creator of popular downloadable preparedness programs on financial collapse, emergency food storage, wilderness survival and home defense skills. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also the founder of a well known HTML email software company whose 'Email Marketing Director' software currently runs the NaturalNews subscription database. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and practices nature photography, Capoeira, martial arts and organic gardening. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
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