Why does Bank of America sometimes refer to itself as Banc of America on some documents?
"From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Banc: Banq (also Banc, banc-corp, bancorp, or bancorporation) is an intentionally erroneous spelling of the word bank, but pronounced the same way. It has been adopted by companies which are not banks but wish to appear as such, and satisfy legal restrictions on the usage of the word bank. ... For instance, if the original company is known as Bank of America, then the new investment banking entity may be known as Banc of America Securities LLC. If the original company is known as Bank of Manhattan, then its insurance business might be known as ""Banc of Manhattan Insurance"" and its holding company might be called ""Manhattan Bancorp"". This practice originates from legal necessity: Under the laws of most states, a corporation may only use the word ""bank"" in its name if it has obtained a banking charter under state or federal banking laws. So, ""Banc of America"" is the subsidiary of BoA that doesn't have appropriate licenses to be called ""bank"". Wonders of complex regulation :)"
"Why are there so many stock exchanges in the world?  The simple answer is that there is a lot of money to be made by charging fees to facilitate the trading of securities, but there are other factors at play here relating to new technologies. Trading volumes have increased rapidly in recent years.  According to this ITG data, in 1997, 6.5 billion shares were traded on US exchanges.  By 2015 this number had increased to 40.8 billion shares.  There are a number of reasons for this rapid increase in volumes.  Most significant would be the introduction of new technologies that allow for high volume, high frequency trading. This increase in activity has be accompanied by an increase in the number of stock exchanges.  As CQM points out in his answer, there has been considerable consolidation in the ownership of ""legacy"" exchanges.  For example, the NYSE merged with EuroNext in 2007, and the combined group is now owned by the Intercontinental Exchange, which also owns numerous smaller stock exchanges as well as a number of derivative/commodities exchanges. However, this consolidation in ownership has been more than matched by the creation of many ""virtual"" exchanges.   In North America these virtual exchanges are called ""Alternative Trading Systems"".  In Europe, they are called ""Multilateral Trading Facilities"".   These new virtual exchanges, sometimes referred to as ""dark pools"", have begun to significantly eat away at the volumes of the legacy exchanges.  If you look at the ITG data (linked above), you will see that the total volume of shares traded on legacy exchanges actually peaked in 2008, and has since then has decreased.  This coincides roughly with the appearance of the virtual exchanges and the new high frequency trading methods.  According to this paper from the SEC site, dated 2013, Alternative Trading Systems accounted for 11.3% of total volumes in 2012.  This will have increased rapidly in the years since 2012.  It is this loss of business that has prompted the consolidation in the ownership of the legacy exchanges. These new exchange are ""conceptually the same"" as the legacy exchanges and must play by the same regulatory rules." "That's accurate.  Here is another risk with the current checking system, which many people are not aware of: Anyone who knows your checking account number can learn what your balance in that account is.  (This is bank-specific, but it is possible at the major banks I've checked.) How does that work?  Many banks have a phone line where you can dial up and interact with an automated voice response system, for various customer service tasks.  One of the options is something like ""merchant check verification"".  That option is intended to help a merchant who receives a check to verify whether the person writing the check has enough money in their account for the check to clear.  If you select that option in the phone tree, it will prompt you to enter in the account number on the check and the amount of the check, and then it will respond by telling you either ""there are currently sufficient funds in the account to cash this check"" or ""there are not sufficient funds; this check would bounce"". Here's how you can abuse this system to learn how much someone has in their bank account, if you know their account number.  You call up and check whether they've enough money to cash a $10,000 check (note that you don't actually have to have a check for $10,000 in your hands; you just need to know the account number).  If the system says ""nope, it'd bounce"", then you call again and try $5,000.  If the system says ""yup, sufficient funds for a $5,000 check"", then you try $7,500.  If it says ""nope, not enough for that"", you try $6,250.  Etcetera.  At each step, you narrow the range of possible account balances by a factor of two.  Consequently, after about a dozen or so steps, you will likely know their balance to within a few dollars.  (Computer scientists know this procedure by the name ""binary search"".  The rest of us may recognize it as akin to a game of ""20 questions"".) If this bothers you, you may be able to protect your self by calling up your bank and asking them how to prevent it.  When I talked to my bank (Bank of America), they told me they could put a fraud alert flag on your account, which would disable the merchant check verification service for my account.  It does mean that I have to provide a 3-digit PIN any time I phone up my bank, but that's fine with me. I realize many folks may terribly not be concerned about revealing their bank account balance, so in the grand scheme of things, this risk may be relatively minor.  However, I thought I'd document it here for others to be aware of." What kind of card are you applying for?  My first card was a bank of america card.  I was a back of america customer. I tired getting nicer reward cards,  but I got rejected fit those.  Now they don't stop sending me junk mail. There are several major US banks including Bank of America, citi and Banco Popular that will open an account for people without a SSN. Most will require an in branch visit to open the account.   As some one else mentioned American Express will open accounts in other countries based on an existing relationship or at least they used to. "It's a form of debt issued by the United States Treasury. As the name implies, a 10-year note is held for 10 years (after which you get the face value in cash), and it pays interest twice per year. It's being used in the calculator to stand for a readily available, medium-term, nearly risk-free investment, as a means of ""discounting"" the value that the company gains. The explanation for why the discounting is done can be found on the page you linked. As a Canadian you could use the yield of comparable Canadian treasury securities as quoted by Bank of Canada (which seem to have had the bottom fall out since the new year), although I don't suppose American notes would be hard for a Canadian investor to come by, so if you wanted to be conservative you could use the US figure as long as it's higher." I was forced to give my bank permission to cover any overdrafts out of my savings accounts. Or pay the bank a fee.  After 6 months I discovered they were still taking out a fee, when I confronted them they said it wasn't the overdraft fee it was just an administrative fee.  Banks need to burn in hell. Banks loan out money they don't have to you to get you to pay them interest. It's all just computer bits. Papier maché would require that they actually have money. If everybody told BofA that they wanted to close their accounts and to get the money in cash, it would never be able to happen. "The credit and debit terms here is, talking from bank's point of view (shouldn't be a surprise, banks are never known to look at things from the customers' POV ;)).  In accounting, a liability (loans, owners capital etc) is a credit balance and asset (cash, buildings and such) is a debit balance.  Your account is a liability to the bank (in accounting parlance that is because they owe you every single penny that is there in your account, btw, in literal parlance too if you really make their life harder ;))  So when the bank accepts money from you, they need to increase their asset (cash) which they will debit (higher debit balance for asset means more assets), and at the same time they also have to account for the added liability by ""crediting"" the deposited money into your account. So when bank says they have credited your account, it means you have more money in your account. Now, if you transfer money from your account to another, or make a payment through your account, your account will be debited and the beneficiary account will be credited(bank's liability towards you reduces) More or less what everyone else said here... but hey, I could also take a swipe at banks ;))"