The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I read the other day that Bank of America was planning to charge $59 a year for fees on using their debit cards.  Apparently the new finance laws are going to cut back the swipe fees from an average of 44 cents a card use to a cap of about two bits.  Banks were pulling 19 billion dollars from these small print fees, but now they’ll only get barely over 10 billion.
Down here at the fiscally challenged South End, we had an ATM machine at Tyee Store for awhile.  Three dollar fee for every transaction.  You’d see folks extracting $10 to pay for their cigarettes and lottery tickets and think:  holey moley, that’s a usury fee of 30%.  But they pay for it later.  Actually, it just sort of disappears from their account and I suspect they never really bother to do the math.
The banks are betting that these same folks won’t notice and won’t care.  These are the same financial giants who gave folks subprime loans without one thought concerning their ability to make long term payments.  These are the monetary wizards headhunted from our physics departments who gave us our current recession and who took TARP money but never plowed it back into a recovery.  These are the folks who decry government regulation and live pretty much by the motto BUYER BEWARE.
I guess it’s hard to demonize the folks my neighbors use to run their transactions at the local stores.  They run their credit cards and pay the minimum monthly payment.  They swipe, but they never gripe.  They lost their job, lost their savings, lost their house….but they’ll pay the 5 dollar a month debit card fee.  And when the time comes, and it will, they’ll use the pawn shop for a loan.  Eventually they’ll go the Pay Day Loan or Money Tree and pay huge usury fees, all legal, all sanctioned, all owned by our mega-banks.  The poor get poorer, that much is true.  They need to get smarter.  Probably why we’re making all those cuts in education is all I can figure….

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at 5:35 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.