Financial Regulation Bill – I am a firm believer in keeping the government out of our business but………
This new financial regulation that has been passed doesn’t surprise me. It is absolutely no surprise that Congress would intervene in something that banks have been abusing for years now. I don’t begrudge any company a profit and a healthy one at that. I like to see extremely profitable companies. In fact I am a raging Capitalist when it comes to that. And, I hate government involvement of any kind. You can’t give the democrats any justification for passing new laws.
These banks have been abusing their positions for years. Any business model that is built on deriving profit through usurious fees on its customers is an unethical business model in opinion. When you are running an unethical business practice for that long, you can certainly expect that some politicians are going to get involved. It is a really easy way for them to gain votes.
Let me explain what I think is unethical about the bank fee structures.
My bank charges $37 for an overdraft fee on my VISA check card. Unfortunately I have had the unpleasant experience of paying a few of those fees back to back. I thought I had a lot more money in the account than I did. I made a series of small purchases from Ebay using a Paypal account. I got hit with 4 overdraft fees of $37 each on purchases that were $5 or less each. This actually happened to me more than once to my embarrassment.
Who in their right mind would think that it would be a good policy to charge a customer hundreds of dollars in fees for twenty dollars worth of overdraft fees? This policy is insane. I asked my bank why they did not just refuse the payments to those merchants. They said it wasn’t their policy to decline charges of this little.
I knew that the real policy was to suck up more money in overdraft fees from someone like me whom they knew could afford to pay those fees. Needless to say I was pretty mad about the whole ordeal. They offered me $100 per year protection against overdraft fees. I told them I wasn’t willing to pay $100 to keep an account at their bank. They were supposed to pay me interest on the money in that account, not the other way around.
This was just incredibly stupid and irresponsible policy on the bank’s behalf. I looked around at my other local banks to see what their policies were on this. As it turns out, they were all doing something similar. No wonders Congress got involved.
Had one bank stepped forward to police its own industry and offer a creative solution to this obviously huge demand in the marketplace, then Congress wouldn’t have had such a good argument for expanding banking regulation. I readily admit that the banks abused people to the point where the wrath of GOD (our federal government) has now intervened in an attempt to set things straight. We all know how that is going to end up. Government never does anything right – and I mean ANYTHING!
A reasonable banker would have said that we cannot possibly charge customers a fee greater than the cost of the offense. If you overdraw your account by $5 then the maximum penalty for that transaction should be $5. I heard today on the news that this is the exact same stance the Fed has taken on the subject. Hurray for some common sense at the Fed. Come on though people. This isn’t rocket science. Pick pocketing people for hundreds of dollars for small overdrafts is way overkill. It is stupid policy and now you have got stupid government policy to comply with. Good job you fricken meatheads.
The damn fools running the show at these banks let dollar signs get the best of them this time. They threw common sense out the window. They pissed people off to the point where Congressmen knew they could gain from it politically. Now the banks are going to pay the price for it and so are we. It is a damn shame that it came to this. Stupid management = stupid laws to regulate it. Damn you fools! How could you not see this coming?