Corporate money-sequestration titans Bank of America and Chase Bank today announced that their recently announced new fees and the hikes of existing fees will actually cost more money to introduce, charge and enforce than expected, leaving net profits lower than expected.
The senior profitability analysts of the two mega-corporations issued the following statement:
"While we were in the process of determining the best methodology of allowing our customers to directly donate to our investors' bottom lines, we failed to take into account the costs associated with this otherwise monumentally profit-generating new fee structure.
"Apparently, our lawyers inform us that the government requires we notify customers before withdrawing funds they expect to use for paying their defaulting mortgages, back-child support and other fees recently instituted by our fine capital-sequestration establishment.
"Although most of our customers are online, we have decided to contribute to the economy by employing forest deconstruction workers, dead tree product manufacturers and volatile chemical plants to produce and print over a billion pieces of paper which will then be collected by thousands of sanitation workers, shortly thereafter.
"Unfortunately, this economically-responsible approach does not come cheap. Moreover, there are computing resources required to make the detailed calculations of the optimal order in which to apply payments in order to extract the highest number of profit-generating fees whilst still leveraging the highest interest rates possible on repayment products. Not to mention the extremely generous salaries we pay to programmers who make that magic happen. Finally, there is the cost associated with call center workers who A) field inbound calls from irate customers who do not understand the logic behind the newly imposed fee structure or B) make outbound calls aimed at using forcefully gentle persuasion to encourage debtors to continue making payments and buying everything they will never in their lives be able to afford paying back.
"To offset these unexpected costs in order to most efficiently pad our bottom line without having to incur any extra expenses, we will be implementing an additional Fee Surcharge. The final language may simply call it a Fee Fee in order to bring the title in line with other Fee naming standards.
"Effectively, for the end customer, it will mean that whenever a fee is assessed, another small fee that is a tiny fraction of that fee will also be assessed to cover the costs associated with introducing, utilizing and enforcing said fee.
"This fee will be iterative, as this additional fee will have its own costs associated with it. See, we're already thinking ahead so we won't have to come back in 5 months with a Fee Fee Fee and so on.
"Now, you might think that this iterative fee structure would generate unlimited, exponential profit due to its iterative nature. Not so, since each fee is an tiny fraction of the iteration preceding it. Eventually, the fees trend toward 0. The math is all very complicated and fuzzy, but we assure you the formulae involve 'e' and are completely sound.
"For instance a $40 overdraft fee would incur a $2 Fee Fee, which would incur a $0.10 Fee Fee which would incur a final $0.01 Fee Fee (rounding up to the nearest penny).
"In the long run, we believe this change will ensure our profitability and increase the transparency of our profit-generation fee structure, so that anyone can understand how efficiently and effectively it works to best serve our investors."
Industry pundits have agreed that this move does in fact make their profit-generation structure extremely transparent. Someone would have to be an idiot not to understand exactly what Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase were doing and why.
Several cagey customers gave the banks a hesitant thumbs up, commenting: "That why we're not just their customers, we've also bought shares!"
