Topic: I Wish Banks Would Curl Up and Die (Read 2316 times)

>>>The sooner banks, US government and their allies crash and burn the better off we will be.

whoa, whoa, whoa, I haven't even enrolled in my local prepper group yet. :-)

That may be true, but when it comes to the banking industry I think it's pretty difficult to be too harsh on it.

Not only does the modern monetary system (implemented by, controlled by, and profiting the banking industry) rob us all of wealth regularly, requiring society to take out more loans in the first place, but the restrictions on who can and cannot legally loan, and at what rate, as determined by the banks themselves (aka: regulatory capture) reduces competition. Without modern banking, you likely would have been able to get the loan anyway, but at a lower rate!

And beyond that, it's not like bitcoin will ever eliminate all banking... hopefully it'll just shut down the modern-day, restrictive, oppressive kind.

+1 again... People regularly disgust me.

My earlier posts can show I'm no friend of the banking sector, but I shall remind a few here that banks can help sometimes. I've used a bank and I shall be forever grateful to that bank when I got a loan which enabled me to buy my home.

I'm all in favor of BTC but we may all need credit sometimes. Only banks have been able to provide it so far.

"Take it from an American, to many of us it sounds that way too. And their obliviousness to how they sound is the most frustrating part."




+1

Not all of us are in that group.

Continual dissatisfaction caused me to move my accounts to smaller and smaller banks over the course of several years, until finally I walked away entirely and never looked back; I've been bank-free for at least 5 years now. Ironically, with the various laws and controls around banking that have cropped up, I doubt I could get another bank account now if I wanted to. Fortunately, I don't want to.

So yes, living without a bank account--provided a few crucial services, like a mortgage in your own name, aren't needed--is possible. If you work off the books, or have a small business with an alternate money management setup, or get a paycheck from a company with an account at a local bank, it doesn't even have to be difficult.

Is it more costly? Yes and no. I don't have easy access to some of the money-saving features I used to (direct deposit, complimentary debit card, a "safe place" for my money, etc.) but at the same time I don't pay a lot of the costs I used to either (various bank fees, errors and bad bank policies that cost me money; loss of privacy; having accounts frozen or not having access to funds/services as needed, etc.) Plus, the experience paved the way for me to be pretty open to the idea of being my own bank with bitcoin.

I guess the question is, do we really want financial freedom or not?



Yup. I've witnessed this before myself (I *think* it might still go on in some businesses in the U.S.) If businesses can pay you in cash perfectly legally, even if they simply stamp and cash out your paycheck themselves at the office, why don't they? Because they don't have to, because it saves them money (at your expense,) and because the entire system is encouraging it... and now everyone else is adopting the "anti-cash" perspective too. Telling your employees they have to get paid via a prepaid debit card is pretty much financial coercion; I've seen the fees and restrictions, and they're deplorable.



Take it from an American, to many of us it sounds that way too. And their obliviousness to how they sound is the most frustrating part.

Anti-laundering laws are in themselves illogical and the term is essentially a dysphemism, laundering being any funds not reported to the government and/or acquired by illegal means (illegal usually involving the denial of your rights to your body and consumption of any substances you see fit by, yours truly, the babysitting government that will prescribe amphetamines to your 8 year old child)

Terrorism is also a myth, it simply does not exist, and even if it does it certainly isn't popular on such a sheer scale to encourage such global measures, the ultimate aim of "anti-terrorism" is to prepare for handling problematic citizens with inhumane ruthlessness or to gain other financial advantages by means of brutes.

Every time I hear an American speak up against terrorism it's like hearing a Nazi SS commander speaking against the imaginary leftist communist jews trying to take up the world...

in europe private banks get money from the ecb (central bank) for less than 1% interest. when entire economies/countries/societies like the greek or the portugiese want money the have to beg those private banks and those private banks give it to those countries for 8 or 10%. the ecb will not lend money to countries, only to private banks.
but they say it is a "national debt crisis"

Patience fear not, let them fear us.

On the interest part I find it funny that I earn 0.02% on a "savings account", on the other hand the bank lends out my money and charges 30%+ on it.

Credit? I think we can all agree that mortgages and credit are only work for rich people

I wish... Banks could give more interest
I wish... Banks could give me more credits
I wish... Banks Would Curl Up and Die

+10 dude ^^

the only thing banks are doing is screwing the people...i wish theyre lives will be miserable someday..

I think the biggest issue people have with banks these days, is lack of privacy.

If you see some of the characters that work as bank tellers these days..... wow is all I have to say.

I try to use bank tellers as little as possible. They are always trying to cheat the customer at the teller window; short changing, and all kinds of tricks.

I have had at least three tellers try and steal from me in the last 4 years.



Lack of trust with today banks, no good.

Can't really blame BitStamp, they have to comply otherwise they will not survive.

It is all very frustrating.

I already transferred away my coins from Bitstamp, they screwed up with this verification thing.

Man if Ron Paul had been elected we would probably have had the choice to pay our taxes with bitcoins.
What a shame.

These are good points. Also there is the fact that small to medium size businesses provide 70-90% of the economic activity and employment in many countries. Stifling the cash economy to such an extent is effectively killing economic activity at the bottom end of the scale. It might not look like you are stopping much, since who cares about $1-$1000 trades ... well if there are millions and billions of small cash trades then even small disruptions of the cash economy inevitably lead to less economic activity and growth for the wider economy.

I'm quite sure if they rolled back all these insane cash restrictions and printed larger denomination notes again (e.g. $500, $1,000 and $10,000 dollar bills) then the economy would grow significantly ... oh wait, the terrorists might win if the economy booms?

As long as they're honest, banks have actually always played a legitimate and fair role in society, the problem is now you have things like the interest rates being fixed to below 1%, they're receiving infinitely printed money from central banks and they lend money to people who couldn't pay them back in a million years, I suspect quite literally in some cases, look at the ridiculous governments bonds for an example, granted banks won't be involved in the ones publicly traded as much but certainly in private.

+1 Even worse in some cases their employers insist on a prepaid debit card that then extorts the employee with usurious fees. The latter is becoming a very serious problem in parts of the United States.
 
My take on this is that the war on cash in many 1st world countries is having a particularly detrimental effect on the poor and lower middle class. A very simple example is payroll. 50 years ago many employers would pay their employees in cash. The cost of handling the cash was the responsibility of the employer. Today many of the same employers will pay by cheque or even worse a prepaid debit card. The cost of handling cash is now passed on to the employee either in the form of a fee to cash the cheque at a cheque cashing store or fees on the debit card.

I do not begrudge the banks at all, they have their place and actually do a very good job in many cases of meeting the needs of the upper middle class and the wealthy. Where they fail is at the bottom of the income scale, where it is very difficult for them to break even let alone make a profit from these customers without charging exorbitant fees. Let us not forget that the cost of AML / KYC compliance to the bank is the same regardless of whether the customer has a net worth of 1,000,000 USD or 10 USD. The profit opportunity for the bank on the other hand is very different.

The reality is that cash and now Bitcoin are by far the most cost effective solutions at the bottom of the income scale.

The whole monetary system banks have created is a complete scam