Tell It To Al

A Hundred Monkeys is taking 100 Monkeys to court in a federal lawsuit filed in Milwaukee.

Or as the Associated Press reports ,”Monkey See, Monkey Sue.”

A Hundred Monkeys is a marketing firm in Mill Valley, Calif.  It claims 100 Monkeys, a public relations firm in Wauwatosa, Wisc., stole its name.

The term, however, dates back to at least the 1970s when it was coined to describe how groups of monkeys learn. Click here to read about it on Wikipedia.

Court records show A Hundred Monkeys trademarked its name in 1999, but I think the only thing these monkeys are going to learn is that litigation is costly.  

A Hundred Monkeys specializes in coming up with names for companies, if you can believe that. 100 Monkeys, on the other hand, is a PR firm.

Who would hire a monkey to provide either of these services?

Where do they think they are, “Planet of the Apes?”

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of strolling the aisles of Wal-Mart and running into someone you simply could not believe.

A new Web site encourages users to snap photos of freaky Wal-Mart customers and post them online. But be warned: If you start scrolling through  peopleofwalmart.com, you may not be able to stop laughing.

Click here to read my column on the site’s creators.

Bank failures are only going to cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $100 billion through 2013.

That’s up from the FDIC’s previous estimate of $70 billion. But what’s a few billion when you consider that grandiose risk-taking in Ponzi-like securities and real estate markets is a national pasttime?

Almost sounds like just the bonus money when you consider the trillions that the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank have injected into the banking system.

Click here to read more on the FDIC’s latest estimate. At least the FDIC is asking banks to pony up $45 billion in insurance premiums.

The FDIC, however, may also have to tap a $500 billion line of credit it has with the U.S. Treasury.

So far 95, banks have failed this year on top of 25 last year. This has put the FDIC’s funds at the lowest level since 1992. And with continued double-digit unemployment and a withering commercial real estate market, things could get worse before they get better.

President Obama declared victory over a global banking crisis at the G-20 gathering in Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, nearly 100 banks have failed in the United States this year, up from 25 last year, and the end of the era of bank bailouts is no where in sight. I talk about it with Shawn Patrick, anchor at Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News.

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Too bad all those Americans losing their jobs can not afford a new mattress so they can get some much needed rest.

Or maybe with the banking crisis still lurking, people don’t want to give up their old mattresses because they are stuffed with cash.

Whatever the reason, the mattress industry is flat on its back.

Simmons Co. on Friday said it would try to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Click here to read story.

Geez, how are we going to get our Beautyrest now?

Here’s a novel take on the old, please-send-me-your-bank-account-number email scam: Pretend to be Mrs. Madoff.

Seems like a longshot requiring someone to be stupid, greedy, plus sypathetic to the wife of history’s biggest Ponzi schemer.

Here’s the pitch:

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One of the ways Bernie Madoff collected so much loot for his Ponzi scheme was to take money from feeder funds.

Imagine financial professionals charging their clients rich fees just for taking their money and giving it to Madoff or even the lesser-known Tom Petters, alleged to have run a $3.5 billion Ponzi in Minnesota.

This is exactly what Neal Greenberg and his Agile Group did, according to a lawsuit recently filed in Boulder, Co. 

Greenberg even set up some Rube-Goldberg-like financial machinery that converted his clients’ reasonably safe annunity plans into reckless spins at the Ponzi wheel, the lawsuit said, allowing him to charge enormous fees.

Greenberg sucked in former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo with a little help from conservative talk radio show host Mike Rosen. Greenberg paid Rosen to hawk Agile for years. Click here to hear Rosen’s radio spots on Agile.

Both Rosen and Tancredo lost significant portions of their life savings in what this lawsuit calls “a leveraged hedge fund of leveraged hedge funds,” or perhaps more succinctly, an alleged Ponzi of Ponzis.

Click here to read my column.

Click here to read the complaint.

Click here to read what I wrote about Agile when I first broke this story in February.

Click here to watch my discussion of Agile on Fox Business News in February.

Did anybody seriously believe banks would pay back all the tax money we gave them under the Troubled Asset Relief Program?

“It is extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment,” Neil Barofsky, the program’s special inspector general, said in testimony prepared for a Senate hearing today.

And did anybody seriously believe banks would stop needing our tax dollars once we opened the spigots?

The Associated Press reports this morning: “The Obama administration is signaling that it is in no hurry to let the $700 billion financial bailout program expire at year’s end amid continuing stress on the economy and the banking system.” Click here to read story.

When it comes to forecasting the economy, talk is cheap. What government leaders do is a better indicator of where they think the economy is going, and what they’re doing is holding fast to the rescue lines.

Banks that have survived a housing market implosion, and a prolonged recession, now face an economy plagued by double-digit unemployment and a tanking commercial real estate market.

Nearly 100 banks have failed this year, about four times the number that failed last year, and many observers expect this toll to keep rising.

It’s so bad the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. boss Sheila Bair has said her agency may need to tap a $500 billion credit line from the Treasury.

Obama, himself, has a word for term for all this. It’s called “kickin’ the can down the road.” Eventually though, someone’s feet are going to get pretty sore.

Tony Little, the wildman/pitchman selling fitness products on the Home Shopping Network, counts the many ways he’s been almost killed. Click here to read column.