Bank of America

I have been with Bank of America since Freshman year of college. Bank of America maintains modest savings account rates, but more importantly, also has a branch wherever I see myself visiting. In high school I had to deal with a checking account with a transaction fee at virtually anywhere not in my home city.

Bank of America is a globally recognized bank with a far reaching business practice. BoA also loans a lot of their money out, I'd assume, to make profits. More risky business practices would include: sub-prime business loans, blue chip stocks.

Bank of America was founded in 1988 and profitable for many of the years since then. Before the big credit meltdown in Fall 2008 the stock value was $30.70, while now BoA (NYSE: BAC) is standing around nearly a half of it's former value $12.07. These are ball-park figures, there is no time to crunch the numbers on my end.

The company did receive Troubled Asset Relief Program money, summing $45 billion. Although the evidence I obtained does not cover whether the branches of BoA's business was directly involved with giving loans to unqualified persons, one has to think where BoA lost that $45 billion and why they needed to borrow it.

Bank of America, while showing evidence of cutting back since the recession, will not be considered a significant contributing factor in the fall of the financial bubble by this blog writer. It was the absorber of Merill Lynch, remains an ex-debt holder to the U.S. tax payer, and consistently gives good to excellent customer service.

Disclaimer, though: without tiring myself out in financial statements and news articles there must be some shady business dealings done within this as any other company.

Free Trade Blog

For our upcoming paper in English we're to write an essay which speak towards this prompt: Do the benefits of free trade outweigh the consequences?

These past two (or maybe just one) week(s) we've read a lot of different perspectives and focuses that think about free trade in the classroom as well as in the real world.

Myself: "Communism doesn't seem to work, there's comparatively no competition between the amount of goods a communist nation can make compared to a freer nation such as America with capitalism."

Uncle V. : "Looking at East and West Germany, one was prosperous, one un-wealthy, both the same culturally, ethnically, the only difference was political / economic system and the country they were in. It's clear that free trade was better."

This short summation of my thoughts on free trade as a trade system is: yes free trade has it's benefits and it's not perfect. It's the best worst system we got.

Sweatshops. When the idea comes to mind I think about huge factory-skyscraper jam packed with hundreds maybe thousands of workers having to work long hours to get remedial work finished. These kind of working conditions to us are intolerable, even part-time or temp agency workers get better treated. On the other hand, the workers still get paid and if the country allows it they can push their extra earnings into education. I know this is harsh but sometimes you gotta just jump through the hoops, landmarks, and tough times in life.

In the future I will be affected when I look at the label of my t-shirt and look not at just the size but where it was made.

Mom and Dad

Here is what I learned at school today:

I learned at school that you shouldn't play the fool

and people who learn will never be spurned for

putting others first and it's okay to thirst

it's okay to buy American if you'll work for the simoleons

In prose form what I learned last Friday in English class is more like this: It is within imagination that the people working on my items (clothing) have less comfortable amenities. The countries of my particular items that day are the U.S.A. and China. Would I work in the conditions? I would have to in order to live. On average people in China make $19.53 per day, according to a worldsalaries.org article. American's make $106.99 per day but have higher costs.

On average american's make 5.48 times the daily wages of people in China and to be honest I do not know if I could live on $19.53 per day. There are a lot of creative ways to make your dollars stretch: coupons, buy in bulk, sales. Also there are half-way houses, price ceiling housing, and secondary jobs to look for.

In short, to survive we need to find a desirable job and develop the set of skills we will need tosucceed. Find something enjoyable which will also support the lifestyle desired.

A warm welcome to all!

Howdy classmates. This blog will be where I complete assignments for English 1A. My name is Christopher, you can call me Chris, I am a General Studies:Science Major here at Foothill College. However, I will be going to a Franciscan University in Steubenville, OH where I will study for my Nursing degree.

I always liked helping people and having been through some non-cliche sufferings I've gotten ready to help people in real sickness. I worked at El Camino Hospital as a volunteer and it was so much fun.

For this class we seem to talk about social justice / morality quite a bit and although I have never had a class like that before I mainly would like to work on my composition and voice in this class. This blog will help me work on these skills by forcing me to write. This forces me to type more often that I usually would.