Really? Can banks go any lower to cheat customers.

It seems the banks stop at nothing to rob people. I think its time we go back to the old ways. Get yourselves a bank safe and start saving it at home. Cash your checks at walmart for a 3.00 fee and put your money where you know its safe in a wall safe!!!!! So fed up with these crooks I could puke. Maybe its time for a bank run on the TBTF guys to put them back in order.. remember if it wasn't for you, they have nothing:. Citizens Bank already charges customers 3.00 to check your own damn bank accounts. How low is that! Think about this.. your savings will no longer be savings, the charges will out do the saving percentage so you will lose more than you gain. Priceless!

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In an effort to protect their record profits, banks might soon charge you for the privilege of having a savings account.
I know what you're thinking: Banks already charge customers outrageous fees for the privilege of having bank accounts. But if the Federal Reserve dares to try and help the economy by cutting a special interest rate it pays banks, fees could get even more outrageous, the Financial Times reports (subscription only). Such a move by the Fed would lose banks some easy money, and they could take the difference out of their customers' hides.
The Fed is desperately trying to find ways to dial back on its $85 billion per month in bond purchases, an extreme stimulus program known as "quantitative easing," while still supporting the economy. One possible approach would be to stop paying banks a tiny interest rate for money they store at the Fed for safekeeping. The idea being that banks would be more inclined to put money to work with lending and other stuff that helps the economy.
But according to banks, that tiny Fed interest payment is the only thing that helps banks break even on savings accounts and other deposit services they provide. In order to protect their multi-billion-dollar bonuses and bank profits -- which have bounced to record highs since that financial crisis the banks helped create, a crisis from which the Fed and the American taxpayer bailed them out -- banks will sadly have no choice but to punish their customers.
That's not all: The banks say that, without that interest payment, they might also be pushed to take ever-crazier risks with money that was once safely parked at the Fed, the FT reports. Stop us before we kill the economy again, the banks are saying. And by "stop us," they mean, "give us all of your money."
There is hope, the FT writes: In order to dissuade banks from screwing their customers, the Fed might offer another way for banks to earn cash from Fed deposits. But that would seem to defeat the entire purpose of cutting rates on the first Fed program.
Anyway, as always, the banks are money-grubbing and horrible. But at the same time, from the Fed's perspective, it might not be the end of the world if people stopped saving so much money. The Fed wants money burning holes in people's pockets, in order to goose the economy out of its semi-permanent state of misery. Through their own greed, the banks could help with that.

On Too Big to Fail, All the Warning Lights Are Flashing Red

"Too Big to Fail" banks played a key role in causing the last financial crisis. Since then they've grown even bigger, without much discouragement from the government (and in some cases with government support). Not a single executive has been prosecuted, despite their rampant lawbreaking, which means that there's been no effective deterrent against reckless and illegal behavior.
And, with millions still unemployed and hundreds of millions still suffering the economic after-effects of the last crisis, we're just about due for the next one.  That's why we convened a panel at last weekend's Netroots Nation conference titled "Stopping the Next Depression: Ending Too Big to Fail."  And that's why our first question was, "What would happen if the 40 million people who live in underwater American homes went on a mortgage strike?"
The panelists included Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-OR; Phil Angelides, former California State Treasurer, gubernatorial candidate, and Chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission; author Robert Kuttner (Debtors' Prison); and professor/author Anat Admati (The Bankers' New Clothes).
Here are some of the key points we addressed:
The jobs crisis created by the 2008 crisis is much deeper and long-lasting than that caused by any recession since the Great Depression of the 1980s. (See Figure 1, below.)
The total economic loss from 2008 crisis is roughly the same as that we experienced during the Great Depression, but stretched out over a longer period of time. (See "The Long Depression.")
Without proper regulatory protections, we're  likely to see recessions re-occurring every five to seven, or seven to ten, years. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon even bragged about it, saying in 2010:

"It's not a surprise that we know we have crises every five or 10 years. My daughter came home from school one day and said, 'Daddy, what's a financial crisis?' And without trying to be funny, I said, 'it's the type of thing that happens every five, 10, seven, years.' And she said: 'Why is everybody so surprised?'"

Dimon later said, "This bank is anti-fragile. We actually benefit from downturns." In other words, misery is their business model.
Recessionary cycles have more or less tended to follow the "Dimon's daughter" pattern during periods of regulatory underenforcement, which is what we have now.  That means the next recession could come along at any time. With mega-banks even bigger than they were before, and with so much economic damage and fragility left over from the last crisis, the next recession could lead to a major worldwide depression.
The financial sector had exploded in size before the last crisis, sucking all the oxygen out of the economy by diverting profits into nonproductive financial speculation.  (See Figure 2, below.) After the 2008 crisis it promptly began expanding again.  And Too Big to Fail became an even bigger problem: Assets at the top five U.S. banks now exceed half the Gross Domestic Product of the entire country, up from 42 percent. (See Figure 3.) That growth was spurred in part by mergers conducted with the government's approval -- or even at its insistence.
There is still an enormous amount of outstanding derivatives risk, and markets for several over-the-counter (OTC) securities are even more concentrated than they were before the 2008 crisis. (Slides that cover those last two points, and several of those which follow, are included in the PowerPoint presentation embedded at the bottom of this post.)
The bankers who inflated the real estate market in the run-up to the crisis are up to their old tricks, using their old tools.  Dead economic ideas have risen from the grave to threaten us again, thanks in large part to the systemically corrupt relationship between money and political power.
What's Washington doing about it? Republicans are working feverishly to neutralize the already-weak Dodd/Frank reform act, while the Obama Justice Department's shameful lack of prosecutions has given bankers free rein to continue defrauding customers (see David Dayen's piece on Bank of America) and laying the groundwork for future economic disasters.
We ran out of time for questions during the panel, in part because we on the panel talked for a long time. It was exacerbated by a couple longish questions, including one which I thought haranguing Sen. Merkley a little unfairly.
(As an aside, "Q&A time" at these events is always heavier on the "A" than the "Q."  Occasionally a questioner may act as if they were on some inverted version of Jeopardy!, where "your questions must be phrased in the form of an answer" rather than vice versa. You know what I mean...)
Here are the questions I would've liked to ask the panel, if we had found the time:
Why are bankers treated as economic experts? Reporters and politicians are still asking their opinions, which encourages them to engage in self-serving political stunts like "Fix the Debt." It's like going to the captain of the Exxon Valdez for advice on navigation. They shouldn't even be treated as banking experts, much less as economic ones.
How do we explain to the public that top bankers are actually quite unimpressive and have underperformed both managerially and economically?
How do we educate decision-makers and influence leaders? Anat Admati and her co-author wrote in The Bankers' New Clothes: "In trying to engage with policymakers and others on the issues, we discovered that many of them had no interest in engaging in the issues - not because of what they knew or did not know but because of what they wanted to know."
Or, I would assume, what they wanted not to know.  How do we address this problem among a) economists, b) politicians, and c) journalists and pundits?
Can the Fed do more? Should it step outside its traditional role to do so?
If you could tell the average American one thing she or he doesn't know about America's big banks, what would it be?
What is one government response to the financial crisis which you simply -- and naively -- assumed would be done and hasn't been done?
How great a danger does shadow banking pose?  How can it be controlled?
What's the right amount of allowable leverage?
How can we generate a shift in general or cultural perception, so that people understand we don't have to submit to unjust banking behavior or tolerate too-big-to-fail banks? And, in a related question:
How can we implement a "culture of shame" against bankers behaving badly?
I'm sure you'll have some questions of your own after watching the video. Here are some figures, pulled from my slide presentation (which is at the bottom of this page).
Figure 1: Jobs lost since onset of recession


Figure 2: Growth in financial sector


Figure 3: Bank size as percent of GDP


Its coming and no one is watching again