Bank of America to charge $5 monthly fee for debit card purchases
Meanwhile, here in the real world in Cedar City UT, the bank I use, the State Bank of Southern Utah, pays interest on their free checking accounts with no minimum balance required, doesn’t charge for debit card transactions, has never taken a dime from the government, made sensible local real estate loans, and is quite solvent.
And when I can walk in, they know who I am, are happy to see me, and answer questions quickly.
Meanwhile BofA is sniveling about the onerous rules the nasty old feds forced on them after bailing them out with billions.
Banks like SBSU are the model for banks. They provide genuine service and build their communities. BofA should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than continuing to be a parasite on the rest of us.
All the good banks I know are small, local banks with no more than a handful of branches.
Mine was that way. First National Bank of Christiansburg. It got bought out by a group that had banks in about half the state (Virginia). Literally, they had scores of bank locations over the entire eastern slope of Virginia. My service went down, my charges went up, the most convenient location for me to walk to disappeared, a few people were let go and I had a 1-800 number to call for support with the person located no where near me.
I left and went to a more conservative but decidedly more local bank, the National Bank – formerly National Bank of Blacksburg. I now have my local service with tellers and people who know me, a closer location to bank in, lower fees and I can call and talk to someone in my community about a problem.
Conglomeration, the endless drive to build bigger and bigger but less personable corporations is one of the biggest problems with America and the world today. Once corporations, particularly financial corporations, get passed a certain size, they should be broken up, period.
With FNB of Christiansburg, a few people who controlled the lion share of the bank got much richer than they were when the bank was bought out. The rest of us were charged more money and a few lost their jobs. This wasn’t a deal to provide a better bank for its customers but a deal to make money for a few already rich people and screw the rest, although, if you listen to the Stellar One jingle you might think otherwise.
Re-regulate all the banks and move our banking system BACK to the rules it had to follow in 1960! And you know what’s odd about me saying that? That makes me a conservative by definition!
And bring back Glass-Steagall too!
Also, bring back the marginal rates we had in 1960, adjusted for inflation, of course. The billionaires had little choice but to plow their profits back into their businesses, thus driving employment. We could use some of that about now.
passed should be past
Part of this is a change in the amount of skim that the banks can take on credit card transactions from the merchant. It’s a good change to the law, but it basically means that they get a much slimmer margin of the % charged to merchants when using credit cards. Since most banks also pay to be part of the network, it could turn into a net zero value for them (or negative value, if things go really bad). I see lots of banks changing this in the near future, after spending years trying to get people to use their ATM cards as credit cards vs just debit cards.
Personally, I’ve never used my ATM card as a credit card, and have no intention on doing so. The less I expose that card to the world, the better. I have plenty of other credit cards to do that with which are not linked to my bank account. That said, I know lots of people that only have a debit card due to bad history, and being able to use that as a credit card for things like internet purchases is a huge boon for them. This will probably wind up hurting people with poor credit history and/or low-income more than anyone.
But the change was only for the TBTF banks, who IMO opinion, should be prohibited from charging more. We bailed them out, they can take a hit and act like actual banks, and do crazy things like make responsible loans.
I think that an apt protest movement would be for everyone to go back to writing paper checks for all transactions. This would serve to remind the banksters how much money they’ve been saving through debit cards.