BEWARE! THE BANKS ARE OUT TO GET YOU!

[Stanley]

They are on a different planet P. After all, they are Lords of the Universe.....

[Stanley]

Have a look at this LINK for the latest moves towards curbing the activities of the pay day loan companies. Not only do interest rates go up to 6000% but on top of that can be penalties for late payment and even demands to pay the debt collectors for their time.
If ever there was an example of how far ethical standards have slipped in the financial industry this is it. How can it possibly be ethical to charge rates like this and impose penalties? It is estimated that up to half the income of the companies comes from the late payers, the business model is structured to achieve this. The bottom line is that these profits are achieved by landing to applicants who can't possibly pay back the loan. All right, it's possible to argue that these people shouldn't have taken loans in the first place but they are desperate and any way out if you are faced with disaster like eviction or starvation is attractive.
Lurking behind all this of course is the fact that the 'economic miracle' isn't penetrating down to at least 50% of the population whose incomes continue to fall while the fat cats squabble over £3million bonus and salary payments. This completely lop-sided and as long as it continues to deteriorate these kinds of situations will get worse. Remember that Osborne himself has said that 60% of the cuts are yet to come.....

[Tardis]

Rather a savage attack on the Co-op

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... eport.html

[Tizer]

At least the capitalist banks were outright scoundrels and didn't try to con us into thinking they were `ethical'.

[Stanley]

I'm sad about the current state of the Co-op. About six years ago I had occasion to criticise them and was surprised to get a phone call from the then chairman. He had been alerted to my communication because I had mentioned something that was supposed to be an internal secret and he wanted to know how I had got to know about it. We ended up having quite a long conversation and I remember that my bottom line was that the Movement had lost it's way and was heading towards being a property company and a commercial bank. I remember that he replied that the conversation had been 'interesting'.

[Stanley]

Have a look at this LINK for a report in the Daily Mail of Mark Carney's latest thinking on interest rates. The bottom line is that the pigeons are coming home as the need to raise interest rates gets more pressing. Nobody knows what effect the forecast rise to 3% by 2017 will do to the 'recovery'. At the same time Ossie announces an extension of the subsidies to home buyers which many fear is stoking a housing bubble. What happens to these buyers as interest rates rise? The big flaw with present policies is that they rely on personal debt to boost the market. Exactly the same mechanism that produced the collapse in 2008.

[Stanley]

See this LINK for the latest episode in the PPI repayments saga. Lloyd's used a cunning wheeze called 'alternative redress' which meant they reduced compensation to customers and saved millions of pounds. They have been caught with their fingers in the till. Is there no end to their complete disregard of customer's rights?

[Tardis]

Co-op caught short again too, having to raise another £400million to cover PPI payments as the regulator says that they haven't made adequate provision

[Stanley]

See this LINK for one view of the FCA announcement that it is going to examine pension deals going back to the 1970s. The write-off on shares will recover. The really important fact is that if there was wrong-doing in the management of pension pots it should be investigated. Many people have found that excessive management charges applied over the years have demolished what they thought were safe assets.

[Stanley]

Mail from my daughter this morning which I am sure will ring a bell. She was suspicious of the high quotations she was getting from her regular insurance company, More Than, and went searching on the web. She found cheaper quotes of course, the cheapest from, wait for it, More Than! Two telephone calls later and she had saved £400 on the two policies. Both of them perfectly normal policies for the amounts covered.
My question is at what point does activity like this become dishonest?

[Tizer]

My question is at what point does activity like this become dishonest?

I think the important question would be "At what point does activity like this come to be seen as dishonest by the insurance companies?" They don't care whether or not we think the activity is dishonest. This is one of the problems with the giant organisations that we now have to deal with; their very size means that most of the employees are buffered from the real world and they develop and reinforce their own version of what constitutes ethical business practice and what is acceptable or not. This applies whether they are dealing with customers or with regulators and government.

[Stanley]

Sadly, I have to agree with you. Funny old world we live in. The more money there is involved and the less morality and ethics seem to matter.

[Tardis]

Lord Myners is forced to resign from the co-op when the board doesn't accept his "way forward" document

[Stanley]

Got a nice surprise this morning, my compensation for being mis-sold a Card Payment Protection Plan. Just for once the banks have got something right! (Quite surprised how much they had taken off me over the years)

[PanBiker]

We have been enquiring from Lloyds regarding a credit card we had from them when they were TSB. We had it from the early 1980's into the mid 1990's. I sacked the bank off for overcharging in the mid 90's but kept the card on as I remember using it for my business. The bank of course has been TSB then Lloyds TSB now Lloyds. They have a dedicate line for PPI enquiries so I rang it yesterday.

They say the have no record of me holding a card from them from my current address or from my previous address which is where I would have been when I originally took out the card account. With regard to my previous address, the lady on the phone could not search anything without a postcode, the facility is totally postcode based, house number, street, town, county is no use? It's 26 years since I lived there and could not remember the last three digits, I had to Google it to jog my memory!

She cant find any record of me ever having any accounts with the bank(s), very strange as we banked with them from about 1974 before we were married. I had an account, Sally had an account and we had a joint account once we were married and a cheque account. We set up deposit accounts for each of the kids, oh yes and a credit card!

Deny-ability is a wonderful thing, shades of what the Gas Board are trying on regarding my inflated energy usage at the moment.

PPI lady on the phone suggest I call in my local branch and ask them, too bloody right I will!

[Stanley]

Ian, at least you have a local branch. Mine is on Manchester Road in Burnley! No big problem because I can send occasional payments to them by post. The payment was from Barclays with whom I banked at the time.

[Tizer]

Ian, I know it sounds ludicrous but the banks (and other companies too) started chucking away customer records in recent times. I couldn't believe it at first, you'd think they would want to keep everything so they could check back to see whether a claim on them was genuine or not. That's how it was in the old days, you kept the records to protect your business (in a court of law if necessary), as well as to satisfy Revenue & Customs. Then it dawned on me that the banks have got into such a diabolical state that it was a benefit to them not to be able to check back in the records. I'm surprised that the regulators allowed them to get away with it...or maybe not, nothing much surprises me about the regulators these days!

Did any of you hear the news reports of the oldest barmaid in Britain, Dolly at the Red Lion in Wendover? She was asked on the radio if she liked meeting customers every day. She said she loved meeting them and then: "If it wasn't for those customers coming to the Red Lion I wouldn't have this job, would I?" And I thought, that should be written in large letters on a plaque placed opposite every bank executives desk!

[Stanley]

I once helped repair the heating boiler at a facility in Cheshire which did nothing but store cleared cheques for the banks, they probably stored other records as well. I can remember the time when you got your cleared cheques back with your bank statement each month.....
Local solicitors occasionally turned up at Bancroft with boxes of ledgers and files for us to destroy when we were burning the fires off at the end of the day.

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz's dad had stored every one of his Lloyds bank statements for the last 40 or so years. I'll bet Lloyds wouldn't have the same information stored! Quite often the bank records have been junked when one bank took over another, too.

[Stanley]

I did the same Tiz. I had bank records going back sixty years! A couple of years ago I weeded them out but still have about 15 years worth. I think it's a form of security blanket but then security isn't big in banking nowadays, all they are interesting is cunning wheezes and profits.

[Bruff]

Whilst we're on bank statements...

Reports in my weekend paper noted that from 26 April, new rules will means lenders going through potential borrowers' finances with a much sharper eye to spend on outgoings, things like takeaways, dentistry, pet spend, childcare, clothes, cinema, meals out, weekend breaks and so on and so on with what we might call in many respects 'fripperies'. Lenders will ask for 3month's bank statements, which will then be gone through line-by-line for items such as these which generally were not considered previously. Few things.

It is suggested advisers may suggest folk live frugally for a few months to paint a better picture. Looking a childcare and other costs associated with children has raised some concerns. Me and the wife deal in cash (taken out as a weekly budget) aside from the 'traditional' fixed costs of utilities, Council tax, insurance etc, so you wouldn't have any clue what our spend is on meals out, clothes, the theatre etc etc. Last, it's suggested the 'frugal' person on 35 grand a year could in theory under these arrangements borrow up to 170 grand.

Richard Broughton

[Tizer]

Yes, Richard, we still use cash a lot and another confounding factor is our dealings with parents' money and bank accounts for them. We're often using our own money for convenience and then getting it back from their accounts at a later stage. Mrs Tiz is good at keeping records to make sure all this is accurate and fair but a lot of other people in the same situation probably wouldn't have the records to show the bank what's going on. And anyway, the banks probably wouldn't approve because although it's all legal and ethical it doesn't suit their wish for everything to be the way they think is correct (and they don't care much about legal and ethical either, judging by their own activities...PPI, Libor etc!).

[Stanley]

Great isn't it. The system thinks up a gazillion ways to make modern families spend money and then regards them following the trend as a drawback. Mind you, I'm no judge, everything beyond essentials is a frippery to my generation and we feel guilty when we spend!

[Stanley]

Two things grabbed me. First was the far stricter conditions to be imposed on applicants for mortgages. For instance they will have to show they could support payments at an interest rate of 7% as compared with the average 3.5% paid at the moment. Could be a good thing if it prevents people over-extending themselves.
Then there is the refusal to allow RBS to pay 200% bonuses. Interesting one this as the bank says that if they can't pay these rates staff will leave. I wonder how many will actually jump ship?
Another question about these exorbitant bonuses. They are said to be a reward for performance but are paid even in loss-making situations. In addition, how much of this 'enhanced performance' is down to improved market conditions and the recipients were just lucky to be there at the time? This whole bonus structure smells to high heaven of collusion between the top bankers and the supposedly independent remuneration committees.

[Tizer]

There are at least 75 people at RBS on over £1 million a year salary. Some of them will be on much more than this figure but let's assume for the sake of calculation that all 75 are on the £1 million. That means RBS could instead employ 750 people on £100,000 each in their place, yes seven hundred and fifty and still on a massive salary. Or 1,500 people on £50,000 each...or about 3,000 people on the average UK salary. So those 75 by virtue of their grossly inflated salaries are stopping about 2,925 others having a bank job. How did we ever let it get like this?