A banker is nothing more than a fallible human. Why record in my inner monologue they’re to be seen as more than that?
Prior to open discourse online, public relations teams did a stellar job convincing people financiers are special. I’ve been in the room with people that attend Davos. They mock and ridicule the public as they decide who is worth what to their bottom line. They’re uniqueness is a hallucination.
Contemporary society is leveraging well understood propaganda techniques to take advantage of the same biological quirk religion stumbled upon by accident.
One person is one person. Not some figurative thought leader we must kowtow to.
I just pulled the BofA 2021 10K [1] and it shows $3.5bln in service charges, but $24bln in interest income.
Disclaimer: I work for a neobank (chime) which inverts this model and has none of these fees and does free overdraft
that's simply not true. the marginal cost of a checking account is on the order of a dollar. the breakeven on that is on the order of holding (and otherwise using) a deposit of a $100 for a month or two. banks are not losing money on the balance of their checking deposits in any conceivable way.
that's a just-so story told and retold uncritically to convince the gullible that fees are "necessary". they're not. they're pure profit, and borne of pure greed. no bank requires fees to function profitably.
we need to say no to these unsubstantiated, regressive fees, full stop.
That said, don’t let your views blind you to the truth. Unscrupulous actors will often drive an industry into predatory practices, it’s correctable but only when people understand the dynamics involved.
indeed.
those sunk costs don't matter in this context, which is why they were originally, and should continue to be, excluded. it's extraneous, obfuscating, and most damningly, apologetic.
My ChexSystems entry wasn't removed until there was a lawsuit against the bank.
Seems like a win win for everyone. Banks should probably be required to allow at least a minimal bank account even to people who aren't the best with their money.
Before the 2008 real estate collapse, this number was less than $100,000 per month.
During the recession, I noted it was going as high as $600,000 per month. At one location in Sunnyvale Ca.
It was the statement of revenue the credit union had - the overdraft section was a single line on the document... I am uncertain as to why they posted it, aside from a "transperency" for the credit union members...
Like in theory, someone who closes an account $2.50 in the negative does very little damage to the bank directly. The $2.50 is a small fraction of the annual overhead of the bank account.
Yet these behaviors are highly correlative of unprofitable checking customers. The entire checking account model seems to be based on whales that return the bulk of the profits. If you sneeze wrong, your statistically 10x less likely to ever become that whale.
From a profit maximizing POV, it totally makes sense for banks to do this. But from a "banks are a basic utility" point of view, it doesn't seem to make sense.