Shake, Rattle and Raise Fees say the Banks

The president of the Consumers Banking Association, Richard Hunt said “Again, we do not want to charge our customers. We were forced to by Congress interjecting themselves into the marketplace.”

David Lazarus with The Los Angeles Times stated: The Federal Reserve says that it pretty much costs about 4 cents to process a debit card transaction, considering the huge economies of scale, 4 cents. So that means the current average of 44 cents represents a 1,000 percent profit. So now that we know that, as of tomorrow, that's going to be cut in roughly half to 21 cents, well, that's still a 500 percent profit.”

Bank of America isn’t going to lose money, their profits will be lowered. Yet Bank of America has the unmitigated gall to justify these profits by saying they provide fraud and overdraft protection, manufacture the card (is it made overseas?) and maintaining call centers. These plastic cards and all the other “services” they offer herd people into spending their money faster and with fees attached!

Using the excuse of maintaining “call centers” to justify mega profits would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad; the call centers are outsourced and they pay wages too low for Americans to compete with.

Now, their lust for money and power is transparent. No amount of profits will satisfy these gargantuan banks who are “too big to fail”. Not only that, the bankers threaten us. Richard Hunt said “This is a credit union and small bank issue. You are going to see thousands of small community banks go under because of regulation by Congress.”

On the contrary since the Savings and Loan bailout of the eighties, thousands of banks across the country have gone under due to lack of regulation including century old investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. The truth is the opposite of what Richard Hunt said, bigger banks have swallowed up the smaller banks and that’s how we ended up with banks too big to fail.

Today, the banks are coming right out and saying they will retaliate and make us pay for government doing what it’s supposed to do, protect the powerless from the powerful… except for when it comes to bailing them out of course, then they want Congress and all of the American people to interject billions to bail them out from their own lawless risk taking, so they can come back stronger than ever to charge us more fees. The deadly spiral is absolutely outrageous.