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“Holy crap!” That’s how Craig Price, a UBS AG senior vice president , told securities regulators he reacted when he saw the $2,600 tab for a client-development dinner he attended at an upscale Palm Beach , Florida, restaurant. It wasn’t the size of the bill that stunned him. It was who paid for it -- an ailing, 90-year-old UBS client. The client wasn’t even at the dinner, but the broker who managed her trust was. So was the broker’s girlfriend, a longtime confidant of the client who had power of attorney over the trust. The trust paid the bill. Price dug deeper . He says he ultimately discovered bigger charges to the trust: a Bentley in the girlfriend’s name, a trip to Toronto on a private jet and an attempted fund transfer to buy a penthouse apartment in the girlfriend’s name. Nancy Tsai and Dennis Melchior Photographer: Patrick McMullan/PMC Price alerted his superiors, setting off a chain of events that would become tabloid fodder. The broker, Dennis Melchior, was quickly fired fo...

Rich and Poor. Credit: Flickr/Sandra Cohen Rose and Colin Rose. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Originally published on  Everyday Feminism . The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.” Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range. “It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained. Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then,  I thought, doing the math in my head. At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my tak...