Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

Ah Shakespeare.

Ah banks.

I know government is often the worst at, directly, overseeing things.

But the fact that these huge monolithic companies both have products and goals of the same stuff leads to an implicit falseness - conflict of interest.

What do banks want to do? Make money.

What do they sell? Money.

How do they make money? By taking payment for services, or borrowing wholesale and lending retail.

But they create money too (watch "Money as Debt" on Youtube). They create money from nothing, and in exchange for a risk of loss of money that doesn't truly exist, take much more of your money back than they lend.

It's more complicated than that, of course - there is inflation to be taken into account.

I have a few bank accounts - two with co-operatives and one with a building society. These guys are decent - not motivated to profit for profit's sake. But in order to deal at all, they have to deal with the big boys.

I was incredibly annoyed to find that on a SWIFT payment (transferring money from one country to another), rather than using the interbank rate, an intermediary bank (in this case HSBC, which has holdings in many countries) was used. And guess what - despite paying £25 to get the money moved, I'm also stung for a rate about 3% off the interbank rate.

Get this - it cost HSBC nothing. No money moved, or very little - they will have funds in both originating and destination country, and some balance will exist between the two countries.

The text on my bank's website is rather misleading - it talks about the interbank rate, which is what I would assume would be used. But no, it's HSBC's special rate, designed to skim money for doing pretty much nothing.

Byebye, my money. Gone to.. yes, some banker's bonus.

It just makes me so sad - ok, I'm not going to starve for the lack of the £50 they skimmed (it would have been cheaper to just take the money out of the ATM, which is what I *have* been doing - foolishly I assumed this would be better for a larger sum).

But crikey some - lots of - people earn less than $1/day. So that's 3 months of wages HSBC just, er, took.

So.. socialism seems appealing to me. Take the customer, "consumer", side of banks and make the price the public pays for money have some bearing on the cost. Not just let the banks pay 1% interest on some crap locked-in savings account... Bugger "the market", trickle-down is a joke. Money is what drives the capitalist economy forward, and it's clear that the current custodians are too conservative, stupid, self interested and greedy to do the economy much good.

Grumble grumble. Well, here's hoping the new Conservative majority government here in Canada wrecks things, and the £ sterling makes a fighting comeback!

Hmm.. except, I want to get a job - or find some means of supporting myself - here in Canada in the next few months.

How else will I be able to afford a Ford Mustang?! And car insurance here in Ontario - reputedly 60% higher than in British Columbia, and more like 4x what I paid for an admittedly smaller car in the UK.

Still. At least the weather's better eh? What's that? Rain, clouds, or cloudy rain for the next two weeks?

Friday the 13th is set to be sunny, though!