A Bowl of Suckers
“It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.”
I had heard that quote before today.
But Ryan Krueger’s blog post, “Solving A Bank Heist: Follow The Money,” reminded of those old words by con man William “Canada Bill” Jones:
“Going to the bank when I was a kid was very different. It was a big deal. Not because we had very much money to check on, but because I loved grabbing one orange sucker in the bowl next to the banker. I would unwrap that treat while my mom filled out a deposit slip to make sure ‘these dollars have to work as hard for us as we did for them, son.’ Earning interest in our little savings account was a big deal to my parents. Interest rate numbers were prominently displayed in an immaculate lobby with friendly bankers dressed in nice suits, scurrying around with an answer to every question I ever eavesdropped in on. As a kid, it was the smartest and most sophisticated office I stepped foot in.
Trusting a small local bank made good sense, and the respect was mutual. The bank wanted to take great care of your deposits so you would give them more. They were glad to pay you a healthy savings rate so they could use your money to buy risk-free bonds at higher interest rates and take a risk with the rest loaning it at much higher rates.
I wonder how parents describe their savings account today. Many of their accounts are held at publicly traded global bank/brokerage firms. They never really understood how those cash accounts work. But, for an entire generation, none of this has mattered much since interest rates were so low.
Until now.”
Apparently, banks (or at least Bank of America) has a cap on depositing check(s) over $10,000 each month.
Maybe they enjoy having clients walk in the cold, wait in a line, and then deposit checks manually like in the previous century.
Meanwhile, in higher finance, the Bloomberg Terminal still costs around $2,000 per month for reasons I still can’t process except that traders still think they can beat the market average if their pulses are tied to breaking news.
I like Bloomberg as a business brand for many reasons, but as CB Insights points out in its research report, in this day and age there are several alternatives to new financiers that are more economical:
“The wide availability of specialized data came with the rise of the internet. Especially in FinTech, unbundling has proven to be an effective way of challenging large and well-resourced incumbents, from robo-advisors like Wealthfront or Betterment to personal loan startups like LendUp or Oportun.
In his book Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg explains the early importance of his relationships with the companies that would provide the data used on the terminal.
Today, though, a company collecting that kind of information doesn’t need the terminal — it can provide data online to anyone willing to pay. In fact, it can build an inbound business as a data provider rather than dealing with a data distributor like Bloomberg. As a consumer with specialized interests, it may make even more sense to work directly with the original data provider, as Bloomberg packages and analyses the data in ways that may not make sense for everyone.”
Perhaps there is a sucker born every minute.
But as time passes, a sucker (who overpays for stuff) dies every minute, too.
