BEWARE! THE BANKS ARE OUT TO GET YOU!

[Tizer]

`HSBC closes a quarter of branches, as 1,000 banks shut for good'
"HSBC has closed more than a quarter of its UK branches over the last two years, as part of 1,000 bank closures in total, research by Which? has found. The consumer organisation says that HSBC closed 321 branches since January 2015, or 27% of its network. The much smaller Co-operative Bank has closed more than half of its branches over the same period. HSBC said most customers now bank via the internet or on smartphones. However, Which? said that while 56% of adults used online banking last year, there are still 20 million adults who don't - or can't - use it. Many of those have a poor broadband connection. Indeed, the areas most affected by closures - South West England, Wales and Scotland - are predominantly rural and often with unreliable connectivity. Lloyds has already announced that it plans to speed up its closure programme in 2017, closing about 200 branches." LINK

[plaques]

From Stanley's political comment:.. "The UK makes it easy via 'Brass Plate Companies' and LLPs to enable anonymous companies to be set up based abroad which are, in effect, an easy route to tax avoidance and money-laundering.".At the time of Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) collapse they had 393 subsidiaries in tax havens, including Jersey, Cayman Islands and Isle of Man. Vince Cable said the government should shut them down and not be seen to be promoting tax haven loopholes. Blair, Brown and co: thought otherwise. Even today I'm not sure if RBS still promotes these options.

[Stanley]

Almost certainly yes P. If it were otherwise they would have boasted about their impeccable ethics.....

[Tizer]

'Buy now, pay later' debts hitting young LINK
Backdated interest payments are leaving young people with unexpected bills from "buy now, pay later" deals, a charity has warned. Citizens Advice said that thousands of people in their 20s who signed up to offers were struggling with debt. These deals allow people to delay paying for items for an agreed period of time, such as six or 12 months. Yet failing to pay in full by an agreed date brings interest charges backdated to the start of the agreement. Missing a payment deadline could leave people with bills amounting to twice the original price, Citizens Advice warned. The charity said this was a persistent issue, having helped 24,000 people with 50,000 catalogue or mail order debt problems in the past year. These people had an average debt of £1,300, with young adults aged 25 to 29 most likely to have problems with catalogue debts.

[Stanley]

And, unless I am mistaken, those debts will not show up in the official estimates on household debt.....

[Stanley]

See THIS for news of the Italian bank bail-out. The cause is 'bad debts'. Have we learned nothing since 2008?
See THIS for a BBC report on Deutche Bank. The repercussions of 2008 still echo down the years and I suspect the reason why the US authorities have rowed back from their previous demand is that the bank, possibly the most important in the EU, is struggling. despite all the assurances we are getting it seems to me that banking in general is in a parlous state and in the end the customers will have to pay one way or another....

[Tizer]

The Italian banks were selling corporate bonds to ordinary folk without telling them how risky the bonds were. The customers thought they were the same as the retail savings bonds which our banks use and which are covered by the government compensation scheme (up to a limit).

Unfortunately all this fining of banks simply erodes the capital that we now expect them to hold as a safety measure. We should be targeting the bosses, not ruining the businesses. Like it or not, we need banks...safe banks.

[Stanley]

I agree entirely about the quality of management. RBS is a prime example, the old excuse "It happened before my time" is out of date now. All the evidence suggests that it is high time the shareholders, and that includes us in some cases, should be more proactive and critical. This also applies to the large institutional shareholders, I sometimes wonder whether they are really motivated to pressurise the bank's top management. Too much of the Old Boy syndrome.... "Don't rock the boat, we are all in it".

[Tizer]

There's at least one banker who predicted the credit crunch... LINK

[Stanley]

What a good sensible man! I think he's dead right, debt rises, the 'tighter regulation' never materialised and the same damaging traits are alive and well in the financial world. Meanwhile May issues vapid aspirations about the UK's 'opportunities' after Brexit.... The world has gone mad.

[Tizer]

I see that Barclays is refusing to pay the fine imposed on it by US regulators and will go to court to fight it. This harks back to what we've said before about them thinking themselves `above the law'.
I see they have new terminology for the Barclays loans - `craptacular loans' Bloomberg

[Stanley]

Why do I get the impression that the management mode is very close to playing spillikins?

[Tizer]

Our excitement today was receiving a credit card statement for Mrs Tiz's Sainsbury's card and finding three pages of transactions amounting to over £400 of spending that's nothing to do with us. This is the second time that we've had a Sainsbury's card mis-used. She only got the card for using in Sainsbury's to pay for the weekly shop and a few times a month to make regular payments. Half of these transactions were marked up as `Moscow Visa' and the other half were currency exchange charges, one for each Moscow transaction. They've been going on since early December but we didn't know because we don't have Internet access to the account. How Sainsbury's Bank could let it continue for weeks without detecting that something was odd I really don't know. Banks are always swanking about how clever their algorithms are for detecting unusual usage but obviously Sainsbury's haven't yet invested in such features. Mrs Tiz phoned the bank straight away and then had to jump through all the hoops to get them to sort it and remove the transactions from our account and cancel the card. They kept asking what the payments were for and she kept telling she didn't now other than what was printed on the statement. Then they assume we must have some link to the person making the payments. Mrs Tiz kept her cool but she's going do without a Sainsbury's card in future, they simply haven't got their security sussed yet. I'm sure the problem must be internal to Sainsbury's because the card is used so little and only for familiar payments.

[Stanley]

That's terrible and the classic credit card nightmare! I hope you got a full refund, a profuse apology and an ex gratia payment for the upset! If not send in a bill for the time you spent sorting it out!

[Tizer]

No, they didn't apologise and they don't offer compensation. They seem to regard it as a normal day to day event. Banks now seem to consider fraud as simply as an unavoidable overhead.
I found this from January 2016 on The Register:
`Sainsbury's Bank web pages stuck on crappy 20th century crypto' LINK
We weren't using the card or account online but the article seems to sum up the company's attitude to security.

[Stanley]

I like the link..... Dead in line with what Janet was telling me for years and she knew about these things. One of her biggest tasks was managing the replacement of the WA police systems and what she did there was scrap the old system entirely and build them a completely new facility in another location using none of the original system except for the data. It was radical and expensive but did the job. This is the reason why these big banks don't do the same job, it's cheaper to 'bolt-on' additional layers but this does nothing to clear out the weaknesses of the old system. Janet always said that the only way to effectively clean out an old system was to physically destroy it and start again. The WA police believed her and now have a far more secure system.

[Wendyf]

Col received a text earlier today saying that our MBNA credit card was in danger of being used for fraud and that he should text RING to the number stated. He immediately thought it was a scam, checked the account online, found everything was OK and deleted the text. After a bit of pondering while doing my mucking out in the stables I asked him to phone up the credit card company. Sure enough it was a bona-fide text, an online merchant's database had been hacked and our account was listed as one of those stolen. They have stopped the card now. Of course they can't tell you where the details were stolen from, but there are less than a handful of companies who should have our card number on record.

[Stanley]

I routinely ignore cold calls and emails form Talktalk on the grounds they are almost certainly a scam. The only thing I would take any notice of would be an email request for me to contact them on what I know is the legitimate number.

[Tizer]

The only thing I would take any notice of would be an email request for me to contact them on what I know is the legitimate number.

That's beginning to be where the problem arises - knowing what is the legitimate number and needing to be able to convince the bank that you are genuine. Banks, like many large companies these days, don't really want us to phone them, they want us to go through tortuous online contact forms instead.

[Stanley]

Yup! It reminds me of something I heard the other day when a former intelligence chief was being asked about the hacking of digital voting systems. He said that there was a simple answer, a blunt black lead pencil, a voting slip and a booth. Same thing applies to the bank, I communicate with mine by letter. That can't be hacked!

[Tizer]

I hope that some of our esteemed leaders here and in the US will see that they need to start looking for some alternative means of communication rather than relying on the Internet and mobile phone. Otherwise we're going to see lots more strategic hacking by Russia, China, North Korea, ISIS etc. That prompts me to write something in the Household Tips topic...

[Stanley]

They are too busy thinking about money and personal advancement..... Don't hold your breath, we are on our own....

[Stanley]

I heard a commentator talking what sounded like common sense this morning about the weird succession of record highs on the stock markets. She said that if you look closely the enhanced share values are almost all companies which trade in dollars and so the devaluation of the pound (Which she pointed out is not finished yet and is ongoing) has automatically boosted their value. In contrast, purely UK trading companies are not doing well. She also pointed out that the 'healthy' retail results reported over Xmas are fuelled largely by increased debt and there has to be a limit to this. The high and rising levels of domestic debt are perhaps the most accurate reflection of the true state of the economy.
That all makes sense to me.......

[David Whipp]

For my sins, I sit on Lancashire's Local Government Pension Scheme committee.

Over the last eight years or so, the fund has had a strategy which has included a higher proportion being invested in global investments. Since last June, these have "increased" in value quite significantly - about half the "increase" has been due to the fall in the value of the pound.

[Tizer]

Yes, it's a great big bubble inflated by the strange mix of events and just waiting to go bang but company bosses are loathe to admit that things aren't working well in their businesses and keep putting on a brave face. Personal debt is soaring and at or above the level before the credit crunch of 2007/8. Inflation will kick in sometime soon, interest rates will rise and people who have only experienced very low rates on their debt over the last 10 years will get a big shock.