3-6-3 Rule

  

Banks! And bankers. Yes, that rhymes with wankers, and for good reason. This pithy maxim refers to the notion that bankers get money lent to them via The Fed at 3% interest. They then lend out that money at 6% interest. And they are on the golf course, of course, by 3. Nice work if you can get it.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is interest?20 Views

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finance a la shmoop. what is interest? well you know how common the catchphrase

00:08

that's interesting is used? why well because something of interest is something of [man stands in theme park]

00:15

value. right if it's interesting it's valuable to know. yeah that's where the

00:20

notion of interest came from. so financially speaking the thing of value

00:25

you have is your capital- your money- the dough you saved from mowing lawns all

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summer. and you can use that capital to make more capital for yourself without

00:36

having to you know mow more lawns. all right well how do you pull off this

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magic? you invest your money and one interesting way to invest it in is in

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bonds, which conveniently for this video pay interest. well interest is just rent

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on the money you're loaning someone. and when you buy a bond you are the landlord,

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right you're renting out your money to someone else, that is people will pay you

01:03

say 60 bucks a year to rent a thousand dollars from you the rate they're paying [kid rents money from a stand]

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then is 6% a year to rent that lawn-mowing grant. and if you were buying

01:14

a formal publicly traded bond like the ones offered by say ATT or Comcast or

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Time Warner and others, well you'd be paid your interest twice a year. that is

01:25

you'd get 30 bucks on June 30th and another 30 bucks just before New Year's

01:30

Eve, just in time to buy a bunch of those obnoxious noisemakers. and you'd collect

01:35

that interest until the bond says it'll pay you back your original amount called

01:40

principle. so if this were a ten-year bond paying 6% interest well your

01:45

little journey and renting your grand to AT&T would look like this - see you got

01:49

June 30 2020 collect 30 and then it goes December and during the design it goes I [interest shown on document]

01:54

don't know until you collect your thousand bucks. got it?

01:57

note how much interest you made from the grand you invested in that 6% bond. you

02:02

did nothing for 10 years just sitting on your fat butt watching the Cleveland

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Browns lose football games, and you collected 30 dollars 20 times for a

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total of 600 bucks in total interest, and then you got your grand

02:15

back. 600 bucks for doing well pretty much nothing a concept with which the

02:20

Cleveland Browns are oh so familiar. [man sleeps on couch holding cash]

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