Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts
by cdh on Saturday September 21, 2013 @11:35AM
(#6423244)
Well, that's not quite true. There is always a small risk of losing some (or even all) of your money, particularly if you have a large amount in your account. Obviously that risk is very, very low for smaller amounts of money.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts
by bhickey on Saturday September 21, 2013 @02:44PM
(#6423964)
There are risks we should be concerned about, and risks we should not be concerned about. If you stuff money under your matress, the risk of losing it to a house fire or robbery are several orders of magnitude greater than losing it in a bank run.
Assuming your account is under the FDIC limit, how could you lose money on an insured account? Suppose there's a massive bank run and the Fed has to print oodles of cash to repay depositors. This leads to runaway inflation that occurs over a very short period. If you could have otherwise exchanged your cash on hand for a different currency, sure you would have lost money.
Compared with the actual risks of being unbanked, this is a hallucinatory concern.