HARD to live with them . . . but can't live without them. I refer, of course, to banks. Everyone's bête noir, the banking industry seems to have sunk to an all-time low with the latest report from the Office of Fair Trading amounting to a scathing criticism of the way they operate, effectively ripping-off customers.
The evidence is quite staggering. Unfair penalty charges for overdrafts earn the banks £2.6 billion a year. Personal current accounts, on which customers earn no interest, make more revenue for banks (around £8bn in total) than savings and credit car
ds combined, not least because of sneaky short-term investing.
The money idling in your current account is not so idle after all. It is invested by the bank, sometimes overnight, at high rates of interest, to make them a profit of £4.1bn a year . . . of which you see not a penny.
The OFT's point is that the banks make enough money out of customers to provide free banking in return and therefore have no right to threaten that if their penalty fees are capped low or removed, they will have no option but to start charging us for using ATMs, for statements or for direct debits.
If a revolution is needed, this would seem to be the time to kick banks when they're down and in serious need of customers with savings. The problem is, that rebounds, at least in the short term, on borrowing customers.
Consumers and banks are at something of a Mexican stand-off. So far the banks are the ones who seem to have the cajones to stand firm and tell us we can like their terms or lump them. In the past they've been proved right.
Last year, First Direct set a new current account charge of £10 a month. The good news is that some of the 200,000 customers affected walked. The bad news is that only ten per cent took their business elsewhere.
To be fair to the banks, we share some of the responsibility for the current impasse. We watched them change from benevolent, Captain Mainwaring, financial advisers with moral integrity, to sharp-suited salesmen in an open market. Through apathy, blind faith and ignorance, we watched as they ran rings round us with small print, never even thinking to ask exactly what happened to our money overnight or when we weren't spending it.
As we moved into a world dependent on credit, we became ever-more dependent on the banks' goodwill. Small wonder they have come to believe they can make up the rules as they go along.
If the OFT, the Government's watchdog, can't bring them to heel, perhaps we could pin our hopes on market forces, but for that we need a maverick bank to which we could all defect, one that offers 8.5 per cent current account interest like the Alliance and Leicester combined with the minimal penalty charges of HSBC and the lending power of the RBS. It's about as likely as Santa Claus arriving in August.
It's naive, of course, to think the Government itself can do anything to control unfair practices because it too is terrified of the economic consequences of crossing powerful financial institutions or imposing UK consumer protection laws on banks who trade internationally.
But sooner or later the banks have to consider that with something close to a recession, high taxes and jacked up bank charges, customers are getting poorer.
Banks can't thrive on poor customers. That has been one major lesson of the US mortgage crisis.
Unless banks voluntarily reassess their practices and reduce charges we could see a return to the day when fewer people could actually afford bank accounts at all.
Continuing to squeeze the little man with charges brings short-term profits today. But the long-term effects on the money chain and banks themselves could be devastating. Perhaps our best hope of all is that the banks finally come to see this for themselves and mend their ways.
It's all in the headFINALLY we have proof that male and female brains are anatomically different. The circuitry, even the chemicals that transmit messages, are different, leading scientists to the conclusion that there is not one human brain type, but two.
This carries a number of serious implications, not least for pain relief which has traditionally been tested on, and therefore designed for, the male brain; and for drug and substance addiction to which we now know the female brain is more vulnerable.
On a lighter note, the female brain devotes more space to decision-making, emotions and short-term memory.
This explains why, despite their allegedly superior spatial awareness, men seem to forget where the dishwasher is or that the toilet seat should be left in the down position; why, when presented with a week's shopping list and a supermarket, they are wracked with indecision; and why they have trouble understanding our perfectly reasonable but more finely-honed emotional mood variations.
The good news is they might stop blaming our hormones. The bad news is they will now blame everything on what goes on between our ears.
The full article contains 866 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
