NO POINT SAVING

I apologise in advance because this is going to be one of those short but perfectly ranty pieces which is hopefully going to help me to let off some steam. You see, I heard something on Monday evening which made me feel utterly furious and I just thought that I’d like to share it with you, you know, not because I’m feeling generous and want to share the fury around or anything like that, but because it left me with such a sense of powerlessness and rage that I thought that perhaps I was missing the point and you might be able to enlighten me.

Anyway, I was sitting in a car park on Monday evening, waiting for a train to arrive as I quite often do, and I had the radio on, listening to Eddie Mair and the Radio 4 “PM” programme, when the news of the day turned, as it would, towards the Cyprus bailout story.

You’ve probably heard the anger that this has triggered amongst the ordinary people of Cyprus who have been told that to get their country back on track, anyone with any savings on deposit is going to  have just over six percent of it immediately taken off them, and anyone with more than 100,000€ is going to lose more like ten percent of it.

In other words, anyone who’s been careful enough with their money to put some aside and save it, never easy under the current world financial situation, is going to be taxed on having done so.

Now whilst that is, to be honest, a quite appalling idea, purely on the grounds that the more profligate citizens who have not put away any money for a rainy day get away with it scott-free whilst the careful ones appear to be punished for being careful, that wasn’t what sparked my ire.

What triggered my fury was the discussion between two British financial experts upon the subject, or rather the opinions of one of them, because the woman who was speaking was quite rightly outraged at this breach of the bank’s promise to protect savings under 100,000€, whereas her opposite number, who sounded, quite frankly, like one of those City “Wide-boys” with a flash car, sounded like precisely the sort of idiot who got us all into this mess in the first place.

He believed that it was perfectly fine to tax people’s savings to bail out the banks because anyone who has savings on deposit in a bank is taking a risk, apparently, and is really just giving their money to the bank to play with for a while, and that all savings are, essentially, a risk.

This is, apparently, why we get “interest” – it’s the bank’s way of thanking us for letting them gamble with our money for a while.

In other words, instead of banks being a safe place to store any extra cash you might have available (or, indeed, your wages), which I naively always thought they were, whenever I put a few quid into my savings account it’s exactly the same as if I was putting it into a fruit machine, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised to not find any of it actually there when I try to get it back again.

I presume, of course, that he was talking about the kinds of “high interest” accounts that offer big rewards for short-term savers with pots of spare cash just lying around their mansions, and not just your ordinary Joe or Jane Public who has a few hundred left in the account at the end of the month (not that there’s all that many of them left) but this seemed a truly high-handed and arrogant belief for someone trusted to take care of other people’s savings to actually have.

Tosser.

Luckily, the woman with whom he was debating was grounded enough to try and remind this idiot that most ordinary people who are lucky enough to be savers (i.e. those of us without six-figure bonuses to play with) really don’t think like that, and they just want somewhere safe to put whatever savings they might have, but I got the impression that this moron left the studio, clambered into a car which probably cost more than double what my house is worth, and just went merrily on his way towards earning himself another fat bonus and leaving the rest of us paying for it.

The upshot of all this is that everything I once thought I knew is so obviously wrong that it hurts. Wise heads used to speak to me about the wisdom of saving and putting a few quid away in a bank when I was a young whippersnapper, but they were obviously completely misguided to trust these institutions and, if you do have any money at all, it seems that the mad old eccentrics were right after all and you might as well just stuff in into your mattress.

At least that way the thieving bastards in the banks won’t get their hands on it.