Screw the banks

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 hours ago, Altherion said:

I don't think anyone has actually defended the third one, it's the first and the second that are in conflict. That is, we all agree that banks should not play such games, but given the influence of the financial sector on everything in our country, it's really difficult to stop them from doing so. Thus, the advice here was mainly along the lines of your first bullet point (because they can't play these games with people who don't overdraw their accounts in the first place) and the response to this advice was mainly to accuse it of being useless due to your second bullet point.

I'd argue that what actually happened was that 3 was asserted, and people mostly said "well, 1, despite 2, and 3 is pretty much your fault."

[baxus]

14 hours ago, Inigima said:

I don't disagree that people need to exercise fiscal discipline but it's hard to believe anyone wishes to extend that to defending predatory bank practices, and it's insane that anyone thinks they are mutually exclusive. There are three main assertions flying around here:

• People should be disciplined about how they spend their money and not spend more than they have
   
• Compensation for workers is messed up and many are living paycheck-to-paycheck and not earning a reasonable amount, and that can make it harder to do that
   
• Banks shouldn't intentionally play games with transaction sequence in order to maximally fuck workers out of money

But all three of those can be true simultaneously and to think that people shouldn't be mad about the third one is kind of nuts.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, all three are true.

10 hours ago, Yukle said:

Even thought your profile says your location is in Belgrade, I'd never really joined the dots on what life must have been like growing up for you. That can't have been fun at all.

Looking in, Serbia certainly seems to be in a much better position than it was when I was a kid and we saw it on the news a lot... for mostly sad reasons.

One of our French teachers at school is from Serbia, although she'd be a lot older than you. Her husband emigrated to Australia during the 90s and sent basically all but subsistence funds back home so the rest of the family could eventually join him. Which they now have, thank goodness. It horrible for her, though; their son spent his years from 2 until about 6 growing up in shared care. She still had to work, too, and he'd go to his grandparents' houses and then to friends' houses and then sometimes just have to look after himself.

Things seem a lot better now, though, yeah?

To be perfectly honest, things weren't that bad for me. I'd say I had it better than most and I will never be able to thank my parents enough for that.

Sure, I did stand in line to buy bread and my parents' paychecks were as low as I said but my parents still had some savings so we made it work somehow. Also, when everything is as chaotic as it was back then, people adapt, find new ways of doing things and life goes on as normal as possible under very insane circumstances.

Your French teacher definitely had a much worse time than I did.

As far as things being better now, there's no war and there's no international sanctions so there's that. Still, it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the '90s but it's still far from good. Economy is at a pretty low level, average salary (according to official statistics that many question) is around 375€ (a bit over 400$), there are a lot of people that are unemployed, a lot of people are leaving the country... My wife and I are pretty lucky, both being in software development, so we make a pretty good living by Serbian standards but not everyone is as fortunate.

[Yukle]

12 hours ago, baxus said:

As far as things being better now, there's no war and there's no international sanctions so there's that. Still, it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the '90s but it's still far from good. Economy is at a pretty low level, average salary (according to official statistics that many question) is around 375€ (a bit over 400$), there are a lot of people that are unemployed, a lot of people are leaving the country... My wife and I are pretty lucky, both being in software development, so we make a pretty good living by Serbian standards but not everyone is as fortunate.

That's good to know, for your sake. Here's hoping things get better for all, too.  

[DMC]

Reading over this thread it's preposterous how many are entirely missing the point, oftentimes while patronizing about their awesome money management skills.  

On 5/26/2018 at 8:00 AM, Rhom said:

People in this topic have chosen to rail against the evils and injustices of the banks.

Yes!  That's the point of the thread!  If we can't complain about the iniquity of banking practices in a thread titled "screw the banks," where are we supposed to?  And all but a few seem to agree with the fact that banks behave this way.  If they do, certainly such criticism is warranted.

[Jace, Extat]

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

Reading over this thread it's preposterous how many are entirely missing the point, oftentimes while patronizing about their awesome money management skills.  

Yes!  That's the point of the thread!  If we can't complain about the iniquity of banking practices in a thread titled "screw the banks," where are we supposed to?  And all but a few seem to agree with the fact that banks behave this way.  If they do, certainly such criticism is warranted.

Capitalism is just another word for godliness.

[Jace, Extat]

18 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Have you seen that movie Breach with Chris Cooper and Ryan Philipe?  

 

  Hide contents

 

It's go glorious, Chris Cooper is acting like a good old boy and saying "Why did the Russians lose?  I wasn't their military.  It wasn't their economy (I'm totally paraphrasing the quote).  

Then he says "Godlessness."

 

 

Yeah, I actually dug that movie. It was pretty slick as far as cheap spy thrillers go.

[OldGimletEye]

On 5/25/2018 at 9:49 AM, Rhom said:

Community banks are struggling in most parts of the country however due to the regulations necessary to rein in the larger banks.  Hard for the smaller bank to keep up.t.

I'll leave it to two students and scholars of American Banking to answer this question more thoroughly.

They write:

Quote

Critics of the Dodd-Frank Act argue that the new regulatory regime has weakened small banks (see, for example, Peirce, Robinson, and Stratmann). This criticism is echoed in the Financial CHOICE Act—proposed by House Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling—that would largely scrap the current oversight of large systemic intermediaries in part to reduce the regulatory burden on “community financial institutions” (those with fewer than $10 billion in assets).

 

Quote

Instead, we note that the decline of small banks has been going on for more than 30 years, decades before the Dodd-Frank Act became law in 2010. This decline has been and remains concentrated in the very smallest institutions

 

Quote

To understand the ongoing consolidation of the U.S. banking system, we start with a bit of history. State and federal laws preventing competition both within and across states helped sustain the presence of around 14,000 insured banks for more than 50 years after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was created in 1934 (see chart below). Most of these were “unit banks” with only a single branch. State restrictions on interstate banking—underpinned by the McFadden Act of 1927 requiring national banks to abide by state laws—resulted in a highly fragmented, inefficient, and under-diversified banking system that imposed high costs on customers (see, for example, Jayaratne and Strahan).

 

Quote

Beginning in the late 1970s, technological changes (such as competition from telephone banking) led states to begin easing entry barriers. This culminated in 1994, when Congress passed the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act that effectively ended state branching restrictions. Unsurprisingly, as the chart highlights, deregulation ushered in a period of sustained decline of the number of U.S. banks.

 

Quote

Importantly, the trajectory in the chart shows no shift with the 2010 enactment of Dodd-Frank. Since then, the very smallest banks continued to dwindle, while the two larger classes of community banks were either virtually unchanged in number or increased substantially.

 

Quote

Regardless of any changes in regulatory costs, the odds are that a number of these tiny banks already are too small to compete. A growing fraction also will face increased competition as their clients—principally in rural areas and small towns—shift to using more efficient technology such as mobile deposits and digital wallets that are provided at low cost by much larger institutions (see our related post).