[quote=KSMountain][quote=briansd1]
I think that a pain vanilla, no fee, bank account should be like universal lifeline telephone. Everyone should be able open up one.[/quote]
Sure. Free banking is obviously a basic human right. If the banks (for no reason other than their sheer spitefulness and greed) won’t provide that for free, I guess the government will have to step in.
Is ATM access included in this vanilla account you envision? What about check (and bad check) processing? How about online access? What about face to face or telephone-based customer service? Who pays the salaries, facilities, equipment, and energy costs that are required to provide those services? The bank (and their shareholders) should just eat those costs?
There’s no such thing as something for nothing. What you’re really proposing is to give some folks an artificial free ride at the expense of some other folks.
I agree it would be nice if folks had a simple option available to them so they weren’t tempted to go to the check cashing and payday loan rapists. But I don’t agree it should be free.
Should banks be required to provide a minimum basic account at some nominal rate? Well at first blush that seems reasonable, but which banks? All banks? What rate? Who sets that? Is it the same in all states? What services are provided? In what languages must the customer service be provided? Is there a performance requirement for the servers behind the online banking? Who should be eligible?
I like flu’s approach better. Those guys pissed him off, so he left. The marketplace at work.[/quote]
But don’t forget that with fractional reserve lending, they are making many times the going rate on our deposits.
If we had full reserve banking, I could see charging people for the service provided by a bank, but with fractional reserve banking, they are already making enough money to pay for all the costs and then some. It wouldn’t be as profitable as it’s been these past couple of decades, but banking is, in itself, unproductive, and should be a much smaller part of our economy.
If the banks can’t cut it, then perhaps our financial infrastructure is important enough to be handled by the Treasury. After all, we don’t really need private banks — especially if they are going to privatize all the profits while foisting their losses on the taxpayers all the time, do we?
