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Apr .JI 6 1 Extreme Coupo?ing premieres as a regular senes on TLC

"I didn't expect the huge reaction" Joni Meyer-Crothers, Queen of Frugality

I began couponing in 2007 when my husband lost his job at an automotive factory and we had to pay out-of-pocket for health insurance for our seven kids. By 2008 we'd accumulated so much extra stuff that I started inviting members from our church to help themselves from our open pantry, and I started a website, freetastesgood.com. That's how Extreme Couponing found me. I didn't expect the huge reaction from the audience. I was on the show's first season, and I still receive e-mails every day. I've probably heard from 200 people on food assistance who used to go to the food bank to feed their families but now use coupons to get what they need. My husband got a job at Chrysler- at half his former salary. So it's good coupons enable us to live well frugally. At this point we haven't paid for cleaning or hygienic products for five years. - As told to jessica Grose

May 19 I Construction begins on 23 Biscayne Bay in Miami

"There was no entertainment. There was finger food" Miami Cautiously Welcomes Back Construction Cranes

Large-scale construction in Miami simply stopped in 2008, mirroring the real estate bust nation­wide. Not a single crane was erected over the city for nearly three years. On May 19, 2011, Argentine developer Grupo Melo celebrated the groundbreaking of 23 Biscayne Bay, a high­rise condo building marketed mainly to Latin American buyers. The party for Miami's first major post-crash project was a decidedly ho-hum affair compared with over­the-top events back in the day, says real estate consultant Peter Zalewski:

"There was no entertain­ment. There was finger food." Now glass-and-steel towers are again rising above southern Florida, with 20 buildings under construction and 150 more planned. By the time it was completed in 2012, 23 Biscayne Bay had sold out. - John Tozzi

4

1.1

2011

-I Standard & Poor's downgrades AUg. 5 its credit rating tor the u.s. to AA+

"A stomach churn for the ages" Banker Bill O'Donnell Braces for a Treasuries Crash

After S&P, there was a massive frenzy of fear. The downgrade happened on Friday afternoon. Everyone was waiting to see how the world would react when the markets opened Monday morning. As head ofU.S. Treasury strategies at the Royal Bank of Scotland, I was especially concerned about what would happen at the auctions for U.S. Treasuries on the following Tuesday and Wednesday. I was on the phone with my colleagues all weekend. We were bracing for the worst- that foreign nations would no longer want to buy U.S. debt because it wasn't triple-A. The message to our traders on Monday morning was, "Don't panic, just buy Treasuries." The Dow that day fell634 points, the largest one-day decline since 2008. It was a stomach chum for the ages. But then, a surprise: At the Treasuries auctions, buyers looked past the downgrade. Money poured into the safety of U.S. Trea­suries despite the lower credit rating. We saw big demand from foreign and domestic investors. Rates on the 3-year note hit record lows. At times it felt like '08. Our blood was up. It's crazy to see what markets do. -As told to Matthew Philips

Sept 51 Gold prices peak • at $1,900 an ounce

"Everyone was buying. It was like nothing we'd ever seen" Your Very Own Gold-And a Place to Put It

Beneath the streets of Midtown Manhattan, in the heart of the city's diamond district, there's a vault filled with gold. To see it, you have to be on a list to get inside the office building above it. Once past the security desk, approved visitors are escorted by a guard to an elevator that slowly descends, exactly how far no one will say. Then come two pat-downs and passes with metal­detecting wands. No phones, keys, pens, watches, bracelets, or wallets are allowed. And certainly no cameras.

Inside the vault, the gold is neatly stacked on plain metal shelves. A 100-ounce bar the size of an iPhone is worth about $140,000. A 400-oz. bar- that's 25 pounds of at least 99-5 percent pure gold- is worth more than half a million. Although the vault's been in operation for years, its shelves had room to spare until the financial crisis. As people saw their wealth collapse, they sought security in something tangible. Gold was an obvious choice. Not paper gold- exchange-traded funds or futures contracts- but the real thing. Investors wanted coins and bars they could touch and hide away someplace safe, surrounded by concrete and steel and guarded by men with guns.

Gold mania peaked in 2011, when the price hit $1,900 an ounce. "We Buy Gold!" operations popped up in strip malls, and

Singh In the underground vault

late-night TV ads promised easy riches for buyers and sellers of unwanted bracelets and lockets. Ron Paul, running for pres­ident, pushed to put the dollar back on the gold standard. And a new company called Gold Bullion International (GBO made it easy for investors to stockpile as many gold bars as they desired.

Before 2011 the only way most people could get their hands on gold was to buy jewelry or order commemorative coins from one of those companies selling to the public at marked-up prices. The rich could call their banks. That's what Dan Tapiero did. He's managed money for hedge fund billionaires, including Steve Cohen and Stan Druckenmiller, and in the fall of 2008 he wanted to add some physical gold to his personal portfo­lio. His banker told him that under normal circumstances he couldn't sell him anything less than $20 million, but because Tapiero was a big, longtime client, the bank was willing to sell him $2 million worth. Even then the gold wouldn't really be his. The best the bank could offer was a claim on a certain amount already in its vault, the precious metal it stored as collateral against its own trades. "I wanted it to be my bar, with my name on it;• Tapiero says.

Tapiero called his friend Steven Feldman, a partner at Goldman Sachs, who in turn enlisted Savneet Singh at Chilton Investment, a hedge fund with a large position in gold. Singh, 29, drew up a business plan for a concierge service for gold bugs. It would not only match buyers with sellers but pick up the gold, transport it in an armored truck, insure it, audit it, and park it on a shelf in a vault- with the customer's name on it. Tapiero and Feldman invested an undisclosed amount of money in the 4 business; Singh became the third co-founder.

For the business to work, the trio had to form partnerships • with dozens of different players: precious-metals dealers and refiners, vault owners, insurance companies, accounting firms, and, most important, wealth-management advisers who would pitch GBI to their clients. Their goal was to get on Merrill Lynch's massive Global Wealth & Investment Management platform, which catered to affluent investors. Some of GBI's first hires were former Merrill employees. "It was scary for a while;• Singh says. "I bought GMAT books in case I needed to cram right away and apply to business school." Finally, in February 2011, Merrill Lynch signed on as GBI's first client, bringing along its "thun­dering herd" of 10,000 advisers.

Their timing couldn't have been better. In the summer of 2011 fear cascaded through the financial markets when the debt-ceiling negotiations in Washington fell apart and Stan­dard & Poor's lowered the U.S. credit rating. From July to early September the price of gold jumped by $400 an ounce. Orders flooded in. "Everyone was buying. It was like nothing ~ we'd ever seen," Singh says. "Suddenly people saw the value i of what we'd created." ~

GBI makes money two ways. First, it charges a transaction ~ fee on every buy or sell order. According to Singh, that's typ- ~ ically between 0-4 percent and 1 percent for retail investors. ~ For hedge funds it's far lower. Then it charges a storage fee, ~ which covers the cost of insurance and shelf space at a privately ~ owned vault, like the one under Manhattan, whose owner did 8 not want to be named. Singh wouldn't divulge the fee but says iil

it's much less than individuals would pay to store gold in a vault ~ on their own. Clients can choose to skip the vault; for about ~ $100, GBI will deliver the gold wherever they'd like. One of i GBI's wealthiest customers wanted it sent to his house outside ~ New York, where he buried it in his massive yard. Singh won't ~ say who it is, but teases that "you'd know him." S

As fears have cooled, gold fever has subsided. The price Ill> ~

j2011

I bottomed at $1,200 an ounce at the end of june 2013 before rebounding to about $1,400. Many businesses that bought peo· pie's used gold at the height of the boom have closed. The price decline, though, hasn't slowed GBI's business. Singh says trading volume is up as much as 70 percent over the last year. He's not worried about other companies moving in on his turf just yet,

I mostly because any rival startup would have to duplicate the legwork it took to put all the pieces together. "We've built a sig­nificant moat around the business," he says- wide enough to keep the competition's hands off its gold. - Matthew Philips

Sept 171 The occupation of • Zuccotti Park begins

"We were trying to create an environment where people could be heard" Occupy's Anarchist Founder, David Graeber, Still Has Issues

You don't see us recovering from the financial crisis and

I the recession? When I talk to people who seem to know what they're talking about- and this includes people in institutions like the Federal

I Reserve or the International Monetary Fund- everybody seems to think that nothing was actually fixed. They basically patched it up with Scotch tape, and in two to three years- probably two at this point- it's all going to happen again. Were you disappointed that the Occupy Wall Street move-ment didn't accomplish more?

I I'm personally convinced that if it were not for us, we might well have President Romney. When Romney was planning his campaign, being a Wall Street financier, a 1 Percenter, he

I thought that was a good thing. That whole 47 percent thing that hurt him so much was something the right wing came up with in response to our 99 percent.

I But in terms of changing the whole legislative political

direction, I think that's a lot to ask. We weren't trying to push specific pieces of legislation. We were trying to create an en-

1

vironment where people could be heard. And I think we did that. We also tried to do something else, which was to create this culture of democracy in America, which really doesn't have

I one. And that's such a major task. The more fundamental the aims of a movement, the longer it's going to take. We're orga­nizing in much more constrained and difficult circumstances

I. these days, but it's still going on. It's just that people don't report

on it that much. Most people who warn about the potential of another eco­

"' nomic crisis focus on how to prevent it. But you sound ~ like you see it as an opportunity. ~ Yeah. Well, you've got to make the best of a situation. It's not ~ going to be great. I mean, a lot of people are going to suffer. I !!;' wish they wouldn't. But I don't hear anybody coming up with ~ particularly convincing reasons why it's not going to happen. ~ 1 - Drake Bennett

' • J,s

2011

N 0 \ 1 11 A Change.org petition leads Bank of V. America to kill a charge for debit cards

"I thought we were just going to raise some hell" Activist Molly Katchpole Takes On Bank Fees

The fee really depressed me. It's not like it was this obscene amount of money- $5 a month- but really, like the banks don't have enough? The petition was a way to put words to a lot of the frustra­tion people were feeling. I was being portrayed as just this average person who had finally had it. In truth, I was a nanny half the time and the other

half! worked on mes­saging for progressive politicians and organiza­tions. As a publicity stunt, I'd closed my account and cut up my card on TV­I had all my cash in my sock drawer. I thought we were just going to raise some hell about it and cause a bit of ruckus. I didn't think they were going to back off. - As told to john Tozzi

NOv 15 I Police in New York, Portland, Ore., and other • cities clear Occupy protesters from parks

"We're not really into accumulating big piles of capital" The Occupy Movement's Last Occupant

When Occupy Wall Street protesters set up camp in Plaza Blocks Park in Portland, Ore., on Oct. 6, 2011, jose Serrica bought a tent. "I saw them on the news popping tents, and I said, 'This is cool.' I didn't realize we'd be there five weeks. I thought we'd be kicked out that night." Serrica, 57, was majoring in psychology

at Mt. Hood Community College, working the graveyard shift at a convenience store, and living with a family that ran a small home church. A bank had just foreclosed on the pastor's house. Serrica liked the idea of fighting the financial system.

Although the protesters were kicked out on Nov. 15, 2011-along with Occupiers in other U.S. cities- Serrica still hasn't left. The last remaining Occupier is sleeping across from that park, in front of City Hall, on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag. On March 1, 2013, he gave away his motorcycle, television, fur­niture, and most of his clothing, having pledged to spend the next year living on the street in protest of the treatment of the houseless (the politically correct term he uses for the home­less). He relies on donations to help pay the monthly bill for his Huawei smartphone, which he uses to stream protests live.

Serrica is emblematic of what's happened to the remnants of the Occupy movement around the country. Portland has one of the strongest remaining chapters. They've got a tiny office in a church, a weekly radio show, a nonprofit organization, and a lone tent- actually, it's more like a tarp- still standing as a monument in the park. The office helps to organize protests, which, this being Portland, aren't hard to instigate. Few are focused on the financial system that the original Occupy move­ment was so furious about. Now it's things such as closing the local Mt. Tabor reservoir; U.S. Postal Service outsourcing; coal transportation; Gitmo; shipping fossil fuels down the Colum­bia River; the Trayvon Martin verdict. In their office, just across the street from an anarchist-themed cafe, there's a poster that says, "Bradley Manning: American Hero;• and a whiteboard advertising Occupy events, which include "World Record Tree Hugging: Sat at 2 at Hoyt Arboretum."

But mostly they work on homelessness. When the protest­ers in cities nationwide took over city parks, homeless people in the surrounding areas came for the free food, clinics, day care, electricity, and safety. Many occupiers, in turn, chose to focus less on decrying the evils of overleveraged banks and more on feeding their new camping buddies. "It was a hard, hard decision and broke up part of the movement;• says joe "joe Anarchist" Bennie, one of the original and still-active members of Occupy Portland. "When your need is immediate survival, the banking system issues don't mean anything to you. I got sidetracked. And I accept that. New York really struggled with this. They had fist­fights regularly in their general assembly meetings. They said that we're doing a much better job of it:•

Bennie is one of four members of Occupy Portland's finance team, or, as the other Occupiers call them, the Old White Men Club. He has an MBA from the University of Phoenix. jack "Lit" DePue, who has a ponytail that hangs over an Overturn Citizens United shirt, was a real estate loan officer for 10 years. Michael Wade, a software developer at a hedge fund, is the de facto head of the group. A mellow, churchgoing liberal who feels a little bad about saying he's uncomfortable around anarchists while in front of joe Anarchist, Wade sees the irony in working for a hedge fund and for Occupy Portland. But he likes that some of the money he earns goes to help change the system.

The Old White Men created a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) called Friends of Occupy Portland. It's a lot of effort to keep it going. "I have a couple of people who donate a couple of hundred dollars a month, but that's about it," says Wade, as he leaves to deposit some Friends of Occupy Portland checks at a credit union and pay the office rent. "Fundraising is just not a priority .... We're not really into accumulating big piles of capital. There's a real undercurrent against money."

Friends of Occupy Portland's best fundraiser is Daniel .,..

-\ 1)\ F. . Y' '.!. l ' \..._'/I

Serrica, right, at Portland City Hall, Aug. 9,2013

4

2011

Hong, an 18-year-old freshman at Reed College. At the Bula Kava House, a cafe where they serve the bitter Polynesian hippie drink that's the only legal high Hong can get, he says he started volun­teering at the office as soon as it opened. The group had trouble paying the rent even after the church lowered it from $8oo a month to $375. So Hong went on crowdfunding website Indie­gogo and scored $900. Worried that people thought Occupy was no longer around, and looking for more volunteers, he raised another $1,885 online and took out 25 ads inside buses and MAX Ught Rail cars. "It's ironic;• he says, "because I don't like money:•

Aside from office space, about the only thing Occupy Portland spends money on is Serrica's yearlong project to draw attention to homelessness. In late july, Portland finally ordered Serrica and the roughly 20 other people who slept near City Hall off the sidewalks, claiming they made it hard to access the building. So they moved right across the street. ''We're back at the park that we occupied at the occupation;• he says. "It's hilarious:•

Serrica, who has a mellow, likable cheeriness, giggling after nearly everything he says, did a previous stint as a houseless person- decades ago, for two weeks in Reno, Nev., during a rough patch partly caused by his past struggles with cocaine addiction- but this feels totally different. Not because he gets breaks by going to friends' houses to do laundry and shower but because he's built a community mostly thanks to Occupy Port­land. The people who sleep outside City Hall with him cook on a little cart they keep stowed in the park and share vegan meals delivered by Food Not Bombs. The Occupy Portland media team shows movies, and Rumorz Cafe brings coffee. The outlets at the park for electric cars also work for cell phones. When his year of living on the street is officially over, Serrica says he's not leaving the sidewalk. "This is the best time in my life. I feel like I'm free," he says. "I'm not going to go back into the systemic workforce, plain and simple." - Joel Stein

The Roots' Questlove tweets a warning in advance of a police raid on Zuccotti Park protesters

Rethinking Elizabeth Warren By Sheelah Kolhatkar

When Harry Reid summoned Elizabeth Warren to Wash­ington in November 2008 to run the Congressional Oversight Panel monitor­ing the federal bank bailout program, it was as if the Oklahoma plains had risen up and found a voice. The country was reeling from economic collapse, bank bonuses were about to be paid, and Warren, a polite, politically astute Harvard University bankruptcy

scholar, applied her academic skills to building an intellectual case against Wall Street. It came out like a war cry. "People are angry because they are paying for programs that haven't been fully explained, and that have no apparent benefit for their families or the economy as a whole, but still seem to leave enough cash in the system for lavish bonuses and golf outings," Warren complained to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a May 2009 hearing. "None of this seems fair."

Democrats celebrated her arrival in Washington. Finally someone had come on the scene who could argue for the suffering middle class. Warren gave life to the hopes and frustrations of Obama supporters who felt burned as they watched him continue the no-consequences support of the megabanks started under his predecessor, even while fore­closures and unemployment shot up. But her bluntness made her a political liability. Obama backed away from nominating Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she'd created; he was fearful she couldn't win Senate confir­mation and intimidated by massive opposition from the financial industry, which loathed her.

So Warren packed up her bags, her staff, and her outrage and returned to Massachusetts, where she launched the most expensive Senate campaign of 2012, spending $42 million to defeat Scott Brown. Her defining posture might have been captured best in a 2011 campaign appearance that went viral on You Tube: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody!" she told a group of supporters in Andover .. while jabbing her finger in the air. "You built a factory out there? ~

" Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to ~ market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers g the rest of us paid to educate .... You built a factory and it i!i turned into something terrific or a great idea, God bless. Keep ~ a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is ~

you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who ~ comes along." After she won, Christopher Whalen, of Car- E rington Holding, described her on TV as an "angry Calvinist." ~

Many who tried to stop Warren may come to wish they'd ~ let her have her way earlier. As head of the CFPB, she would ,. have been relatively contained. As a celebrity senator with ~ multiple committee appointments and an oversize micro- : phone, she's a much more formidable foe-and one bankers ; helped create. 0 ~

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