can't stand the stress?

Results of the Federal Reserve stress tests were released yesterday and the results showed that 17 out of 18 banks could survive another financial meltdown.  The only one that fell below the Fed’s standard was Ally Financial, and I am glad they didn’t.

Ally said the Fed’s test was “fundamentally flawed.”

Most of you are probably asking yourselves why I would be glad they didn’t pass muster, and it is a legitimate question.  My response is that I hate their television commercials so much that if Ally were ever to mail me a credit card offer it would hit the shredder twice as fast as all of the other credit card offers from other banks do.

Ally is the company that has the commercial where they have an actor, portraying a complete stranger, hang onto a briefcase of $100,000 for them.  Their contention is that if we hand our money to a strange actor for safekeeping it will be safer than if we put it in our current bank.

They also have that dipstick commercial where a dry cleaner gets rid of its employees and puts a blender on the counter to interact with actors portraying customers.

Really? 

A blender? 

What kind of a dipstick would come up with such a whacked-out concept?

I think—from what I remember in advertising classes I took forty years ago—the purpose of these whacked-out ideas is that if something is weird enough, we will remember it.

I guess they figure that if I know that if I put money in their bank they will hand it to some actor, playing a stranger, who will take more care with it than my current bank would.

Nah!  I don’t think that sells me on their business model.

Or that I should expect to walk into my bank tomorrow and there will be blenders replacing the tellers into which I will have to insert my check and push the puree button to complete my transaction.  Of course the customers at my bank—even including me as the lowest common denominator—will have more sense than the actors hired to play customers in their commercials.

So I say to Ally, get the banking side of your business together, lose the blender and the actors and do some studying for the next time the Fed has you take a test.