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And BoA listened.
Bank of America earned over $6 Billion in the 3rd Quarter but a hidden revenue stream has been stiffled by the Dodd-Frank Act so they had to go out in the open and announce that they were going to whack debit cards users with a $5 monthly fee to make up for it. Customers resisted and the bank has backed down. I said in an earlier post that the $5 fee was a good thing because the big banks would have to put their fee schedules up front instead of hiding them.
That doesn't mean that they won't try to squeeze their cusomers in other ways.
Consumers should prepare for even higher checking and overdraft charges, analysts said. If they use another bank’s automatic teller machine, they may well get hit with higher ATM fees. And if they want to receive paper statements in the mail, they may end up paying for that, too.
The Occupy Wall Street movement started getting media attention right after Bank of America announced the $5 fee. Most people don't know the in's and out's of financial policy but they know when they know when they are getting screwed. The TARP program was probably necessary but we don't have to like it. In my mind to big to fail should mean to big to exsist. The anti-trust laws seem to be a thing of the past.
If regulators were doing their jobs properly, banks would not be allowed to engage in massive speculation through derivatives trading. The near meltdown of the financial system in 2008 has resulted in thousands of pages of new regulations but has done nothing to reign in “too big to fail banks” or reduce systemic risk in the financial system.
Smaller financial institutions were promoting "Bank Transfer Day" on Nov. 5
