5 ms·

> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people. I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply no

• cookingrobot 11y ago
  It's a not consensual extraordinarily high interest loan. Robbery is a fine label to use for that.
  • Touche 11y ago
    It's absolutely consensual; it only happens if you overdraw your account.
    • cookingrobot 11y ago
      They're not asking for a loan, they're asking to withdraw their own money that they put in the bank. The bank deliberately chooses to turn this into a loan if they accidentally ask for more than is currently there.
      • fredkbloggs 11y ago
        Let's talk about the word "accidentally". Suppose I drive to a bar, have three beers, and drive home. I don't bother to check my BAC; I just assume I'm below the legal limit and can drive safely. On the way, I accidentally run over a budding young Progressivist on the street, who then dies. When the sheriff shows up, he finds that my BAC is 0.09 -- just over the limit! Surely, you will agree that any penalty I am assessed for this should be minimal. After all, I did not intend to kill anyone. I did not think I was drunk. Sure, I didn't bother to check, or to assume the worst and take a couple hours' break before driving. But it was an accident. I didn't know that I was over the limit. Maybe I hadn't even read the law, and didn't know what the limit was, or what the penalties would be for exceeding it. Obviously, any big, mean, nasty "justice" system that would impose a heavy penalty on me for this act is evil and unethical. Right?
        • jrockway 11y ago
          Did this hypothetical event take place in New York City? If so, the NYPD would probably throw a parade in your honor. Even if you were a driving a commercial truck and ran over a kid walking to school while driving without a license, they still wouldn't press charges.
          • fredkbloggs 11y ago
            Since this thread isn't about police misconduct, let's assume not. If you insist, feel free to assume it was an older straight white male rumored to vote Republican bouncing around under my wheels.
        • Retra 11y ago
          Except, in your analogy, you are being force-fed alcohol by your landlord, car insurance laws, gas stations, any children you have, public dress laws, ISP, electric company, phone company, and the biological need for food. This puts your default BAC at somewhere between .06 and 0.085 at any given moment. Now if you go over 0.09, do you think maybe that might happen on accident?
          • fredkbloggs 11y ago
            Nonsense. Nothing obligates you to use your checking account for the vast majority of ordinary purchases. And for those that you generally cannot avoid (usually only the rent), nothing requires that you fail to record the amount you spent and track the amount remaining. If you aren't sure of your records or don't care to keep them, use cash for everything else. People with far less education than today's Americans have been successfully balancing checkbooks for over a century. My great-grandfather was a dirt-poor coal miner with a fourth-grade education and he never had any trouble avoiding overdrafts. And yes, he had -- and used -- a checking account for most of his life. Ignorance and carelessness are just excuses; they do not absolve you of your responsibilities.
            • Retra 11y ago
• Bud 11y ago
  No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person? Have you ever been overwhelmed with depression and the panic of a lost job, a few dozen bills you probably can't pay, the shame of asking friends and relatives for help, and in so doing, risking your relationships with those people and your own self-esteem? What you're missing here is that poor people KNOW that they are poor and right on the edge. They are already making a lot of adjustments that you probably can't even conceive of. They have a daily, hourly even, intellectual load from financial panic that more privileged people cannot even imagine. The banks are the guilty party, here. They know that some of their customers are near the edge and in trouble, and they are strategically choosing to exploit them. Period, paragraph.
  • Touche 11y ago
    > No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person? Yes, I overdrew my account when I was in college and had $50 to my name. It was my mistake, I made a purchase unsure of how much money I had. I also used to work for a bank that gave out RALs so I'm perfectly aware of the unethical behavior that happens in banking. So call it unethical, call it what it is. Using inaccurate alarmist language does not help the matter.
    • rfrank 11y ago
      The unethical behavior in question is robbery. End of story.
    • nicksergeant 11y ago
      Being in college with $50 to your name does not qualify you as poor.
    • tdfx 11y ago
      As a college student, I am assuming that you didn't have much money, but also likely had rather limited expenses. To the family with children that has $50 to their name, a rent payment, childcare expenses, etc, most of which they can barely afford already, an unexpected overdraft can be the trigger that sends them off a financial cliff. Poor people often make very bad financial decisions. But so do rich and middle class people. The difference is that the poor people have no one to turn to for help. Exploiting that may not fit the statutory definition of robbery, but it meets it in every other way I can think of.
• kelnos 11y ago
  If the customer had set up the overdraft "loan" feature, then sure, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. How is it sane (and legal) to automatically loan someone money to pay something, without their permission, when you can set whatever repayment terms you want? Declining for insufficient funds is the only correct thing to do in that case. And yes, banks will usually charge a fee for that, too, but at least it'll only be a one-time fee.
• karamazov 11y ago
  Banks make keeping track of the money in your account intentionally difficult. You can't just check your balance and assume that you can spend what's there. Instead, your balance includes only processed transactions, whereas your account also has a list of pending transactions that can hit your balance at any time. Pending transactions can also disappear from your account, only to come back as a confirmed transaction. In effect, you can't be sure of exactly what's in your account unless you manually keep track of every charge you've made. Banks do more than this to make overdrafts difficult to deal with. For example, Bank of America intentionally processes your transactions from largest to smallest, ensuring you'll git hit with the maximum number of overdraft fees. e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one. tl;dr: banks love overdraft fees and do whatever they can get away with to hit you with them.
  • jellicle 11y ago
    > e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one. Even better, if you have $10 and also a $500 paycheck hitting your account that night, which is to say that the bank KNOWS there is no overdraft and that you have the money in the account, they'll process them in this order: -$12 (fee), -$4 (fee), -$3 (fee), +$500 (most eaten by the fees). And some programmer programmed that for them. Intentionally.
    • CydeWeys 11y ago
      I believe there is now a national banking regulation in effect that requires all credits in a day to be processed against your balance before all debits. So in your second situation, at least, you would no longer be hit with fees.
      • moron4hire 11y ago
        If that is the case, then PNC hasn't got the memo yet.
• pyre 11y ago
  Large banks will do things like structure charges so as to extract the maximum amount of overdraft charges. For example: You have $40 in your account. You spend $20, then $12, then $5, then $120. One would logically conclude that at the end of the day, the bank will resolve these *in order* and you will have a single overdraft fee. Large banks *cough* Bank of America *cough* will explicitly structure those charges to resolve like this: $120, $20, $12, $5. Now you have 3 overdraft fees ($35 a pop when I was with BoA) instead of a single overdraft fee. Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this?
  • Touche 11y ago
    > Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this? That's not the language the person I was responding to used.
    • danharaj 11y ago
      They don't have to because most people know that powerful institutions tend to act in bad faith in order to extract as much gain as they can from the vulnerable.
      • Touche 11y ago
        Yes! We do know this. Which makes getting screwed a highly avoidable situation.
        • pyre 11y ago
          So when people act in bad faith it is "ok" so long as we mistrust them anyways?
  • jeffasinger 11y ago
    The even crazier thing about your example, is that they have different offerings for their high net worth" clients, and with those offerings, the structuring is usually much more in the favor of the client than what someone walking in off the street will get. Essentially, a poor person will be charged higher fees than a rich person.
• rokhayakebe 11y ago
  It is robbery, I am perplexed how you fail to see it.