David McElroy

I have to admit that I don’t like banks. Their persnickety rules and condescending attitudes have irritated me over the years in more ways than I can list here. So this might be the first time that I’ve ever been forced to defend a bank. Well, sort of, anyway.

You might have heard the news that Bank of America is instituting a $5-per-month charge for customers using its debit card. When I first heard this, I was outraged, because I knew that the banks were compensated by getting a small slice of each transaction the card is used for. What I didn’t realize at first, though, is that Congress just intervened in the market to cut that fee almost in half, taking away a big chunk of revenue for the banks.

Previously, every time you used your debit card, the bank received a fee from the merchant of 44 cents for handling the transaction. But in an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial law, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) got that fee cut to 24 cents per swipe. In one giant bite, banks had their income from their debit card operations slashed by roughly 45 percent.

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Even though politicians like to pretend otherwise, there is no economic recovery going on. It’s pure fiction. No matter how much money Ben Bernanke shoves out the door of his helicopter, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to put the economy together again.

Instead of facing the reality that what the Fed has been doing for the past few years can’t work and won’t work, Bernanke told Congress this week that the Fed is ready and willing to intervene yet again. He vaguely warned, though, that the Fed can’t do everything:

“Fostering healthy growth and job creation is a shared responsibility of all economic policymakers, in close cooperation with the private sector,” Bernanke said.

In other words, we need a new Five Year Plan, comrades.

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Apple announced this evening that Steve Jobs is dead. He was perhaps the greatest business leader of our age, and he was a visionary who lived long enough to see much of his vision come to life. He was a hero for me and for many others. He died at the age of 56.

I think this is a good time to listen again to the commencement speech that Jobs made six years ago at Stanford University. In it, he talks about his life and the ways in which he saw things differently after his health problems started. It’s just 15 minutes. It’s worth watching. A quote from that speech that’s even more poignant than it was at the time. We all need to remember this:

‎”Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I’ve already written extensively about Jobs when he recently retired as CEO. I’m going to miss having someone around who I greatly admired.