Wall Street Banks Deliver Another Heroic Quarter

All the big banks have now reported Q3 earnings, so here they are:

These might seem like pretty spectacular results to you, since even the top percentile of ordinary schlubs didn’t see their wages go up more than 5-6 percent in the third quarter. But you’d be wrong. Several big banks were flat or even down on these results. Bank of America, for example, opened Monday at $28.11 and is currently trading at … $28.11.

But if Wall Street isn’t that impressed, the rest of us should be. An average increase in profits of 23 percent seems pretty good, especially with all these banks straining under the cruel yoke of Dodd-Frank rules that practically keep them from opening their doors for business each morning. It’s a miracle they can stay in business at all, let alone continue to increase their earnings by billions of dollars each quarter. So huzzah to America’s big banks. Truly they show what hard work and free market capitalism are all about.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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