To be fair, they are lending at a negative interest rate when it is secured against a home by people who are able to put a down payment on the home. Then you have to spend the money on the home, and if you fail to pay it back the bank gets the home. Plus, there are probably repayment terms that prevent you from paying it back on a whim.
Still, negative interest rates definitely feel like a sign of impending collapse to me.
Don’t trust a bank that can’t manage accounts they are in custody of. If it were me I would have gone to the bank, made a withdrawal of all the money that I prove was mine and close my accounts. Let one thing be known, BB&T can not manage the accounts in their custody. That bank needs to be taken over by the federal government and sold.
There is a part of me that thinks if a bank is stupid enough to deposit the money in another account it should used by the account holder has they see fit until the bank corrects the error not counting the account holders original balance. Moral hazard otherwise. Of course ethics would not allow me to do that. I’m not a bank so I have morals and breaking the law is a bad long term investment.
Shit, I can’t find the details. Anyone with Google-fu?
My memory offers some things. Could have been a woman, teacher, not verbeamtet, from the Saarland, who either got an erroneous tax return, or monthly overpayment. Sum was either about 25k or 250k.
Hell, I can’t find links for that. Am I imagining things?
Yeah I thought I read it’s a hedge against inflation… but that still doesn’t really make sense to me because well you’d still be out the negative interest and the difference in inflation. I mean it makes sense if you’re worried that the money will catch on fire or be stolen. That’s all I can come up with… beyond that if it’s a central bank doing it to stimulate economy that makes sense but it seems like it would cause inflation.
It seems like a hedge against a brutal collapse of your economy. You either end up with indentured-servants-lite or with land. Labour and land are two things with real-world value when everything else is falling apart.
I was wondering the same thing. Isn’t the money in your account YOURS? If not banking is f’ed up.
I get that the $120k wasn’t theirs, until someone mistakenly GAVE it to them, then i think it became theirs.
They didn’t steal the money, so much as capitalize on someone mistakenly giving them money that wasn’t intended for them. I honestly don’t see how this could be a crime. what would the crime be?
exactly. total bs.
10 year treasury bonds 
those are federal, lol. sorry the money was further “mislaid”. oops.
(the term “mislaid” is total legal bs to try and get around the reality of what actually happened.)
If only their first splurge was a lawyer’s retainer.
I think this is weird. If I “accidentally” paid the electric company $1000 instead of $100, would I be stupid to expect the rest back?
Punching up vs punching down. Can this couple ruin the bank’s life? Of course not. Can this bank ruin the couple’s life? It already has.
When I was working in BigLaw, the entire firm one day got two paychecks (well, at least everyone who wasn’t an equity partner). The payroll was just run twice. It was discovered early in the morning. There were firm wide emails and voicemails, saying “don’t spend that money!” – but there were many employees who sucked that money out of their accounts within minutes of getting it, when it got reversed later that day a lot of people were then short/overdrawn. It took a while to unwind that mess.
Damn inflation!
By that logic, if you park your car in my garage it becomes mine.
Question becomes, who stole the money.
A Banker will lend you their umbrella when its sunny and demand it back when it starts to rain.
Every few weeks I’ll receive an email that xyz bank is issuing a limited amount of CDs at (IIRC) 4 percent or so. By the time I login to see it there’s nothing there.
Firstly, any genuine counseling along those lines would, sadly, have only further added to the disgust and weary disillusionment felt these days by honest, moral people.
Secondly, even if they “played dumb”, it wouldn’t have taken much (or anything) for a prosecutor to chew them up based on their financial records… including past account statements (e)mailed to them, history of spending habits, and ANY rationale for believing the money was theirs.
You don’t own your bank account. You are licensed or granted access to the bank account and other peripheral services; in exchange for providing these services (whether it is a pittance of interest, free checking, or a toaster) the bank gets to loan YOUR money to other account holders. The money you deposit into the account is not the exact same money you can withdraw at a later date. Instead you will (typically) get cash/coin/etc with different marking and serial numbers. The accounts all belong to the bank, and the bank doesn’t even have to insure them because the FDIC will happily bail them out to a point. After that point; well the consumer gets stuck with it.
As for criminal charges against the bank: this is one of the benefits of having a corporation that is treated like a person but better: ALL the same rights and none of that being able to go to jail stuff!
With all the cases in the news, movies, and local “legend” Joey Coyle, I doubt anyone would believe that they didn’t know it’s a crime to take money that isn’t theirs from a bank. They hunt for people who get extra money from an ATM (which is probably easier because of the camera inside recording images of the idiots who don’t report the mistake).
That sounds vauely correct. Is there a statute of limitations on such a “crime”.
BTW why is it so bloody hard to find buried treasure - we all know it’s out there.
Closest I ever came to that was a guy I knew who used to pay tomb robbers for digging up antiquities in China/Mongolia. He would then spend a shitload of time meticulously scrapping of the thousands of years of crud - with a tiny ivory pick - to reveal silverwork of unutterable beauty (which was smuggled out of the country). I guess that was receiving stolen goods too.
