Sheesh! ... when it comes to commies' 'financial expertise', 'you can't make stuff like this up' - LOL!
Posted on 01/30/2007 12:48:10 PM PST by GMMAC
Layton’s anti-bank campaign ridiculous
By TOM BRODBECK
Winnipeg Sun
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Federal NDP Leader Jack Layton must be running out of ideas on how to make his struggling party more relevant to average Canadians.
How else to explain his most recent harebrained idea of banning banks from charging ATM fees for withdrawals?
For starters, banks don’t normally charge customers fees for withdrawing money from their own accounts. They never have. So I don’t know what Layton is talking about.
If you are being charged, you should change banks.
I’ve had a bank card for more than 20 years and I’ve never been charged a penny for withdrawing money at my own bank. What banks charge you for is withdrawing money at an ATM owned by a different bank. They always have. It’s old news.
They charge you a small fee — usually $1 or $1.50 — for the convenience of withdrawing money from a bank where you don’t have an account. It always seemed like a fair deal to me if you were ever in a pinch.
It’s hardly “gouging,” as Layton puts it.
Besides, you don’t have to buy the service.
If you stick to withdrawing money from your own bank — which, in the old days, is all you could do anyway — you won’t have to pay any fees.
It’s not very difficult to do, especially in today’s cashless society.
The only thing that’s new here is the proliferation of private “white-label” cash machines that charge everybody a fee, regardless of where they bank. They’re popping up all over the place — gas stations, hotels, convenience stores, airports, etc.
There’s one at the Manitoba Legislature.
My advice to people who don’t like those machines is don’t use them. I don’t. Why pay $1.50 to withdraw your own money from an ATM company that rents space at a gas bar?
No gouge
Go to your bank instead, like you usually do — or should do. Banks have machines all over the city. Actually, they have them all over the country and you can withdraw money from them 24/7.
I fancy the drive-through ones myself. They’re great in cold weather. And they’re free. No gouge.
“People are tired of being stung by these fees, they feel they don’t really have any choice and they can remember that years ago these sorts of fees weren’t there,” said Layton. “You used to be able to get access to your own money from your own bank account without having to pay for the privilege.”
I don’t know what kind of glue this guy is sniffing. Consumers have all kinds of choice on where to bank and how to withdraw money. And just like 20 years ago, you can still do it for free.
Layton makes it sound like there’s some new broad-based fee structure in place that everybody has to pay to access their account. Which is completely false.
I know banks are easy targets, but this NDP campaign doesn’t even make sense.
It’s got to be one of the dumbest and most misinformed political campaigns I’ve seen in years.
Everybody likes a little bank bashing once in a while.
But to suggest something in the marketplace has changed in recent years that prevents consumers from accessing their own money without paying a fee is laughable.
It’s simply not true.
PING!
Back in the old days lots of Freepers thought this sort of a thing was a good idea. They couldn't understand that if Banks can't charge ATM fee's then they won't put ATMS on every corner, in 7-11, etc.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Geez, you saying that like it's a bad thing ;-)
I do not like Layton but I do not like people who falsify the facts. I wonder in what country TOM BRODBECK lives in. If he lives in Canada, and has a chequing account with ATM privilege in one of Big Four banks he does pay for each withdrawal on ATM machine, even when he uses his own bank. He is either not checking his bank statements or he deliberatelly mislead the public/ Banks should hire someone who is little bit smarter.
Bank will not charge monthly fee account monthly fee if account holder has certain amount of money deposited all the time on the account (but they pay minimum interest on that amount of money, many people do not realise that). If one want to avoid paying for each ATM transaction, one has to subscribe to upgraded service that are not free. Banks are not making $400M on ATM out of thin air.
The fact is that today one can talk for hours with China or Russia for $1.00. Use of computer networks for transaction is a fraction of a penny.
The privilege to charge $1.50 or $3.50 overseas is no different than airport payphone traps charging $10 a minute for overseas calls -it's a rip-off.
And those who say that banks use their equipment to service us, what's about us working for a bank as teller clerks to get our own money? Or being charged for a "privilege" to use our own premises, our own hydro, own own computer equipment, our own internet connection and our own manpower to do transactions that bank is supposed to pay tellers to do the service for us?
The shoddy, unclean premises of many banks, resembling welfare offices, incompetent tellers with no command of English do drive people to do their banking business from home.
This is what this rip-off is all about. Layton is stupid because he did not address the real isue - rip off charges in the information age.
IN a couple of years Layton will be lauded as a visionary, wait until Canada is in the same situation the UK is in, where very bank is charging obscene 'fees' for everything imagined and unimaginable too.
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