Banking

On the behaviour of banks

Personal historic notes

2014-05-20 — Piketty’s book “Capital in the 21st Century” arrives. It was published in 2013, in French, but I got to know it via the English language news.  The copy I am reading is in French: “Le capital au XXIe siècle”.  A pity he still uses Roman numerals for a work about the future.  But very clear and compelling.

2013-06-00 — Finally some report does propose to jail irresponsible bankers.

2009-11-18 — There we go again: my French bank has just got it into its head that to improve security they will now send to the clients mobile phone an SMS with a single-use code to confirm certain transactions.  Great, but what if you do not have a mobile phone, or like me, don’t want to use this device of permissive disorganisation?  I repeat that the UBS has the best system of net-banking that I know of.

2008-09-28 — What to add, now that all banks have proven to be groping in the dark without knowing it.   How could such a crash as we witness today ever happen, after all that history tried to teach?  Will the people responsible be charged with anything?   How many will die of causes indirectly following from the bank crashes?   I’m highly allergic to "The Economist", I never read it, but I wonder how they explain this.

2008-01-02 — Just discovered the bank charged me interests.   In October I put a large sum on my account and then withdrew it a few days later to pay off something.  This was on a normal account, not a savings account.  The charge was for withdrawing over a certain amount.  Why did they not see that I was just passing a large sum through that account?  They punished me for withdrawing my own money, but did not reward me for putting a large sum in their custody.   In their favour I must say the "bug" was corrected, but only because I noticed and spent my effort checking and then filing a complaint.

2003 — Recently I made an international payment of 1000€.   The bank charged me 10€, though I did this electronically from my home computer, typing all the information in myself.  Then the recipient was paid only 980€ because their bank deducted 20€ costs.

Can we fix this? Do we have to make a revolution? 30€ with a lot of the work done by me!

And now (2003-07) they will also start to charge me for every transaction I do using electronic banking.

But some things are getting better:  I can now at least receive my account statements in a format that is somewhat usable for a spreadsheet.