Mega internet company Yahoo is going through big changes (again). The failing google competitor has amped up operations to stay relevant, doing crafty things like changing the newsfeed on its home page, shelling out unseemly fortunes to app designing teenagers, and betting the house on content like this:

Yahoo has partnered with Business 2 Community, a content site that aims to create “An independent online community focused on sharing the latest news surrounding Social Media, Marketing, Branding, Public Relations & much more”. Articles like the one above feature heavily on the site, and Yahoo is pumping them out on their front page.

I took a look at what author John Gibb had to say about the parallels between elite professional basketball and hawking weight loss products online. It was enlightening to say the least. Writes Gibb:

Affiliate Marketing and Kobe Bryant: More parallels than you might think. (Featureflash / Shutterstock.com)

Kobe once said:

“I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant.”

This teaches us the importance of creating your own name in the industry. Do you feel like branding is for big companies with large advertising budgets only? Think Coca-Cola and you’ll understand why most people associate branding with big companies only. However, the little guy like you and me instead has a little door called “authority presence”, to get their name out there and build a loyal following.

You want everybody in the industry, including super affiliates, web site visitors and customers, to know you’re the real deal.

I’ve actually drawn similar conclusions in my own profession – you must heed the words of the greats and make comparisons with your own life. For example, Mahatma Gandhi once said:

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”.

In 2012, I changed the design of The Daily Banter to a much cleaner look with lots of whitespace. I figured if I want to help make the world a cleaner place, changing my site was the very least I could do.

Gibb also wrote:

Should you ever give up?

“I’ll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it’s sitting on a bench waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.”
– Kobe Bryant.

What does it take to win the affiliate game?

First of all, it requires you enter the field and play until the very last second. This means you don’t give up and quit, like most affiliates.

I have friends who started affiliate marketing back in the days when I dabbled with it myself. They’re still newbie’s, and have no mailing list or sizable income. Some are not in the game anymore. That’s sad…

Some may think Gibb’s claim to greatness is unwarranted, but puts the doubts to rest after quoting his mentor and ’legendary Super Affiliate’ Allan Gardyne as saying: “John is the hardest working affiliate I know – he deserves his success”.

If you are still scratching your head, don’t worry. As Albert Einstein once said:

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

To all the negative commenters at The Daily Banter, that one’s for you…

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An American website that pairs rich older men with attractive young ladies is now hitting the UK. From the Telegraph:

Claiming to offer an opportunity for young women to lead a glamorous life, the American site already assists 80,000 British candidates find a suitable match.

It is now launching an official UK site, despite criticisms it could be perceived as exploiting impoverished women and lonely men.

The site, www.seekingarrangment.com, is currently frequented largely by male business executives with an average income of £170,000 a year, who portray themselves as “sugar daddies”.

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By Ben Cohen: I was interviewed on the RT Network last Thursday on wealth inequality in the US and the shifting perception about the American dream. You can check it out below:

I think the change in the public’s attitude towards social mobility could really spark tangible change in America. The excesses of individualistic capitalism, debt and insecurity is having a serious psychological effect on the population, and increasing awareness about it could lead to a ground swell of popular movements to change the status quo. The sense of change is palpable, and we don’t know how it will manifest, but it’s clear the current system is completely unsustainable and something will have to give.

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A Goldman Sachs director in London has resigned after publishing a devastating open letter accusing senior staff of being “morally bankrupt” and bent on extracting maximum fees from clients by offloading unsuitable investment products.

Greg Smith, who has left his post as executive director of the firm’s equity derivatives business in Europe, claimed that chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn have “lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch”. He added that “this decline in the firm’s moral fibre represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival”..

Smith’s charges, which were swiftly denied by the bank, were published in Wednesday’s New York Times and raised questions about the firm’s relationship with existing clients, whom Smith claimed were referred to as “muppets”. Read more at the Guardian…

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Drone During Storm (Photo credit: Truthout.org)

In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.

When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they’ve been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands.

And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around? Read more in AlJazeera…

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The Obama administration is planning to propose cutting the top tax rate for corporations to 28%, and pay for it by eliminating dozens of tax loopholes companies now use to lower their rates, a senior administration official said.

Chances of a deeply divided Congress revamping a tax system regarded as convoluted across the political spectrum seems remote in an election year, but the announcement on Wednesday is certain to fuel debate in the run-up to November’s elections…..Read more.

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When you hear the word 'bank' you automatically think 'capitalism'. After all, banks have capital and fund all sorts of ventures that make the economy work. Synonymous with capitalism is the theory of competition – markets are free and competitive leading to transparency and better prices for everyone. There are many banks in America and they all compete for business. If they offer competitive loan rates, they get more customers and more business. 

Right?

Wrong. At least in America, that is.

According to Matt Taibbi when it comes to underwriting bonds for state government, 80% of the time, banks never have to compete for contracts costing the tax payer literally billions of dollars a year:

Imagine what NFL gambling would be like if the casinos didn’t publish the point spreads every week, and you’ll get a rough idea of how the swap market works. If you couldn’t look it up, how many points would you give the Dolphins against the Jets next week? Two? Five? Seven? The big casinos know, because they’re taking all that action, that the real number is one point.

In the same vein, exactly how accurately do you think some local county treasurer might be able to guess the cost of an interest rate swap for his local school system?  Answer: he’d probably do about as well as you or I would, guessing the odds on a Croatian soccer match.

The big banks know this, which is why there should never, ever be non-competitive bids for those sorts of financial services. In a sole-source contract for a swap deal, you’re trusting a (probably corrupt) Too-Big-To-Fail bank to give you a good deal for a product whose price is not publicly listed anywhere.

And that's capitalism American style – uncompetitive, non-transparent and completely unrelated to a 'free market'.

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Molly Katchpole, 22 years old, took on Bank of America over its ridiculous debit card fee and won. Just goes to show what happens when people decide to stand up to power. From the Guardian:

I called on Bank of America to back off the new debit card fee, knowing that if Bank of America did, the other banks would, too. I was unprepared for the outpouring of support I got online from others who felt the same way. I never thought of myself as an activist before this, but suddenly, thousands of people were signing my petition each hour – sometimes, up to 40,000 per day.

In the end, more than 300,000 people from all walks of life had joined the campaign. And what is even more awesome, it has inspired dozens of other people to start their own campaigns against their banks. Those 300,000 voices brought unimaginable pressure on Bank of America. Brian Moynihan, Bank of America's CEO, was forced to answer to us on national television. The other big banks, facing an outpouring of customer outrage, were eager to ditch their fees and avoid the same public pummeling Bank of America got. Once Bank of America stood as the last major national bank considering such a fee – and the primary object of American consumers' anger over outlandish banking fees – it had no choice but to stand down.

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Matt Taibbi suggests ‘Occupy Wall St’ add another very specific policy to their agenda; get people to pull their money out of Bank of America:

When it comes to commercial banking, Bank of America is as bad as it gets.

The markets, of course, have lately come to agree, as B of A has lately been downgraded again to just above junk status. The only reason the bank is not rated even lower than that is that it is Too Big To Fail. The whole world knows that if Bank of America implodes – whether because of the vast number of fraud suits it faces for mortgage securitization practices, or because of the time bomb of toxic assets on its balance sheets – the U.S. government will probably step in to one degree or another and save it.

The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.

This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.

This essentially means that Bank of America gets to gamble lots of money and never risk losing it – a classic example of crony capitalism at its ugliest. The public has unwittingly signed on to bail them out if it all goes pear shaped, and given the complete lack of serious regulatory policy coming from the White House and Fed, it’s almost a given that it will.

Taibbi argues that pulling your money out of BofA will send a powerful message to Washington that this type of behaviour is no longer acceptable. The public cannot allow the banks to hoodwink them into paying for their gambling addiction any longer, and the best way to do this is to cut their funding directly.

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(Bank of England)

Britain woke up to the following news today:

Sir Mervyn King expressed fears that Britain is in the grip of the world's worst ever financial crisis after the Bank of England announced it was injecting £75bn into the ailing economy.

The Bank's governor said the UK was suffering from a 1930s-style shortage of money and needed a second dose of quantitative easing to boost demand and prevent inflation falling too low.

'Quantitative easing' is a complicated way of saying 'bail out money' – only it's used to buy crappy assets purchased by banks, not help regular people. The money will be printed and injected into the economy in the hopes that the stock market won't disintegrate. Corporations and the rich need to be assured that the government has their backs, so as expected, the Tory government is all over this.

The hypocrisy, as always, is stunning. Government handouts for the rich are labelled 'quantitative easing' while welfare and jobs programs are called  'bailouts'.

Regardless, it's proof that the only way to recover from a recession is to spend your way out of it. Not exactly standard conservative economics.

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