Dear John: My troubles with Con Ed started back in October 2015.
I made my October payment using Con Ed’s pay-by-phone service, as I have been doing for years. Everything went smoothly, and I received a confirmation number. Then, in November, I received a notice from Con Ed stating that it never received the funds from my bank, JPMorgan Chase. I checked my balance, and had more than enough funds to cover it. This also happened with November’s Con Ed bill.
I called Con Ed and spoke to one of its customer representatives, who told me it was having trouble with Chase releasing funds payable to Con Ed due to a new payment system that it had installed during the summer, and that I should go to my bank and tell it to release funds to the account of Con Ed of NY.
I went to my Chase branch located at 1901 86th St. in Brooklyn, and spent more than an hour with the branch manager. She made many calls to her tech people, who didn’t know of any problems or what to do with the account info that I had been given.
She also made calls to Con Ed and seemed to get only the runaround. Con Ed did tell her my pay-by-phone privileges had been suspended for five months for nonpayment.
On March 9, 2016, I mailed the current bill along with a check for $1,613, the total amount owed, at the Bath Beach post office. The next month, I received a new bill for $1,826, and again sent a check for the total amount, mailed at same post office. I would greatly appreciate any help you can give with this matter. C.K.
Dear C.K.: I checked with Con Ed and didn’t get the runaround. And while I didn’t get a definitive answer, I’m sure your problem is now being fixed.
A spokesman for Con Ed said “We are in touch with the customer and seeking to resolve the matter.”
He added that “several payments the customer tried to make failed, prompting us to put a block on the account. Once we removed the block, the payments still did not go through.”
The spokesman said that “based on what we have learned so far, we do not believe the problem is with Con Edison’s systems.”
Of course, that’s what they all say. But hopefully it’s fixed by now.
Addendum from C.K.: I want to take this opportunity to thank you for all your help in solving my payment problems with Con Edison. It’s your intervention that got ConEd to assign Ms. Rodriguez to be my personal troubleshooter. Thank you again.
Trump’s behavior a ‘Cohn’ job
Dear John: Donald Trump’s aggressiveness was learned from a very close business associate and friend.
It is interesting to note that infamous Roy Cohn was Trump’s lawyer, mentor and friend for many years. Much of Trump’s arrogance, brazenness and insulting aggressiveness is right out of Cohn’s personal playbook.
It was Cohn who brought Trump into NYC’s elite political circles and represented him in lucrative real estate deals. Once one knows the great influence Cohn had on Trump, it is not hard to recognize it in Trump’s actions.
Those brazen actions could be his downfall but for what awaits Hillary in October in e-mails to be exposed and the movie “Clinton Cash.” M.M.
Dear M.M.: Thanks for the background. It’s going to be interesting.
Dear John: If the increasingly erratic Federal Reserve decides to shell out “helicopter” money, I don’t think it would cause much of a jump in inflation.
That’s because if “free money” caused a big increase in consumer demand, all it would do is ramp up some of the thousands of Chinese factories now sitting idle.
There’s so much slack in the world economy that it would take an enormous dump of free money to make a difference. E.K.
Dear E.K.: OK, if you are correct, it would then increase the US trade deficit and allow China to accumulate trillions of dollars.
The Chinese would then hold those dollars in the form of US Treasurys, making it ever a bigger creditor and giving China, which doesn’t particularly like us, more control over American policy.
Or it could just cause inflation.
Either way — and there are numerous bad outcomes — a money dump would not be good for the US, especially coming as it does after the QE policy that has created excess currency.
Thanks for the exercise in hypotheticals.