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Fees on Checking Accounts and Fraud

June 21, 2010

In light of recent legislation further limiting what banks can do in their operations fees on checking are going to be reinstated en masse.  This means in exchange for holding you money you are no required to pay a fee for the bank to do so.  This is where the claim of fraud comes in.  Under a fractional reserve banking system your money is lent out and only a part is kept by the bank at any given time.  The current reserve ratio, or the amount that is kept on reserve at the bank is only 10%.  At any given time, on average, only 10% of what you deposited is actually there at the bank the rest is simply inflationary notes issued by the banks via generous monetary policy of the FED or Federal Reserve.  Before it was only an understood fact that Americans just roll with, or at least most do (I for one do not).  Now the situation is different.  The bank is saying that in exchange for holding your money we will no longer pay interest on that amount, which presupposes it will be lent out to earn us a return, but you will be charged a fee for us to hold it and (you would assume not lend it out or invest).  As far as I can tell there has been no effort by the banks to actually hold your money for you.  Even with the fee it will still be lent out with only 10% held in reserve clearly violating the agreement that the fee you will be paying is for the bank to indeed hold your money.  With a fee service for checking the fee functions as a warehouse receipt guaranteeing your money on demand as it was received.   Most egregious is the banks creating incentives to hold more money in checking accounts to avoid the fees further urging you to give them more money of which they pay you token interest yet reap returns on that money.  This is fraud in the worst sense and the banks should be ashamed of what they are doing and Congress should be thrown out for throwing the privileged banks another bone.  If I am to pay a fee to have money held at the bank and ready at my disposable I expect this to mean that the fee pays only for the costs of the bank to hold that money and keep it safe not to pay for the bank to take my money with a smile and use it to earn them a higher rate of return that the fee.  I am appalled.

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