Be Excellent To Each Other

Surprised there's not chat about this already - someone point me in the right direction if there is.

Anyway, Halifax, eh? Jesus.

Sort of discussed here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1870

but yeah, a tad worrying if you've got a hbos account, but if you've got less that £30k saved up, you should be OK

My brother has his mortgage with them. He phoned them up to see if anything would happen and they basically said 'dunno, mate'.

Our mortgage is with them. Looks like they're definitely merging with Lloyds—which is where my bank account is

Ring them up tomorrow and ask if the two things cancel out.

I'm not convinced they're actually in trouble. There was a massive run on their shares which has put them firmly in buyout territory, rather than them actually being in dire financial straights.

If this gets Howard off the telly, it has to be done.

My mortgage is with Halifax too. Maybe they'll all be written off as bad debts.

The best thing is no more of those fucking musical ads.

Well, quite. Share price != company's finances.

Yes. The firm I work for's share price dropped by 3/4 over the last year from c. $55 to c. $14, which meant that there were brief rumours that there might be a buyout, then I think everyone realised that there wasn't anyone who had that much money to spend.

Unless said company owns their own shares and uses it as collateral against their commitments.

You guys seem to be keeping under the radar at the moment...

I judiciously transferred all my cash out of the 'fax this morning.
Been meaning to do it since they stopped being a building society anyway.

's because we're part of the secret capitalist cabal that really rules the planet.

You're doing a proper shit job of it. Have you got a big pile of gold and old Battletech models in a big vault somewhere as backup?

I opened a savings account there about 6 months or so ago. At the time the assistant who was opening the account was desperately trying to convince me to sign up to their investment scheme thing, in which they used your money to buy shares and stuff. Or something like that; I wasn't really sure what it all meant, and the low-quality animation of gold bars moving around that she showed me didn't really help.

Anyway, I asked her what would happen if the Halifax got into trouble. "Oh no," she says, "That'll never happen to the Halifax." Sure, I thought to myself, I'll stick with whatever the standard account is and ignore this poorly-animated weirdness. Meanwhile, she was apparently pumping all of her savings into buying whatever these gold bars represented.

Looks like I win, for a change.*




*Although I now have several accounts with a bank that's about to go tits up.

I'd withdraw all my money from Natwest, but that would actually mean that I had to pay off my overdraft. Fuck that, then.

whats up with natwest? something I should know about?

Er, no. It's just who I bank with.

What's of more concern to me is your atrocious taste in music

Anyway, this one in particular seems to be squeezing of the market as opposed to bad banking, as it were. If you have a mortgage with them, the worst case scenario is that your deal will get altered to suit the current climate and not you, which will be a chore. If you have savings with them, then it might be, what, I don't know... prudent to move them. I suspect it will make no difference.

Unfortunately, I think we will all get affected/effected by this state of affairs, either directly or not, but what I do know is that it will pass. Relatively painlessly for most of us.

There's no problem. The bank itself is fine but the markets are hitting it hard.

Even without it merging, the gov wouldn't allow a high street bank to go down.

In all this I'm quite annoyed about how the media are hyping all this. A few months ago it was petrol would be £1.50 a litre, now they are scaring us that the banks are all going under. The media are cunts.

cuss me bad over this, but it's true. It's all fucking scaremongering bullshit

That was also being said of US investment banks until Monday though.

me too hence was worried when you said you would withdraw your funds

Never ahve I been more amused and happy to be so utterly skint, and have fewer financial worries than people with loads more money than me.

I am a very bad person. But hey ho, no point my worrying about all this, as there's nothing I can do about any of it anyway.

An investment bank is a little different to a high street bank. Letting an investment bank go under wouldn't lose you an election.

I've got a current account and credit card, and the terms of both have been going down the toilet for a few years now. Coupled with outright cuntery with the online banking*, incompetence of face-to-face staff*, shitness of intra-bank transfers*** and ever-rising credit card interest rates the only thing keeping me there was laziness and lack of faith in the inter-bank account moving system. With renowned bunch-o-cunts Lloyds in charge, the time has come.

Nothing to do with the financial stability of the business(es) at all. Although given the problems shown when huge institutions go under, I do wonder at the reasoning of creating an uber-bank now Especially when it involves the government neutering the FSA and Bank of England to get it done.

* In a clear attempt to offset Fast Payments, you now can't even set up a payment for the next working day - it has to be two in the future. Cunts.
** I updated my address at a counter, and they put the wrong one in. Using the paper-free option, I didn't realise until last month. Unfortunately, they sent my new debit card out the month before. Expired card declined in shops a-go-go! Hooray!
*** Online credit card payment - 4 working days. Phone, at least two. So I had to rush to a branch on the due date. All because the online banking kept saying "only one active payment allowed per account", leading me to believe I'd set one up well in advance. Rather than confusedly having deleted the normal 'pay someone/a bill' payment from my current account that they'd automatically, without sending me an email as normally happens, set up for me and I assumed was out of date, after my new card arrived.

The Metro this morning said this was all down to "Spivs". I'm looking forward to when it is discovered that inflation is because of teddy boys, and that fluctuations in the commodity markets were caused by rubes and wide boys.

Not the metro's wording, it's Alex Salmond's.

And when Alex Salmond says "Spivs" what he really means is "English people", the racist cock.

My friend works for HBOS, so don't transfer all your money out, ta.

To be honest that is a description of all financial markets everywhere in the world and in all of history. Have you met a trader? With few exceptions they are complete cocks. Unfortunately they are also the basis of a modern captialist system.

My mattress shares are up. (Blast. I should have actually bought mattress shares.)

Considering how much republican nominees rely on big business funding for electioneering, I'm not entirely convinced that's true.

Yeah, it's a golden age for the mattress selling industry. I'm more interested in the tertiary markets though. My toolshop, which specialises in lockpicks, crowbars, balaclavas, oversized holdalls, anonymous white vans, and very accurate roadmaps is doing very well for itself.

I was talking about the UK.

Tell your mate he's a smug annoying cunt:



Ta.

I said US investment banks, and it was the US Federal Reserve that decided not to bail out Lehmans, even though they did for Bear Stearns. Before this week no-one would have thought that the US Federal Reserve would not bail out a US investment bank, just as no-one would think the UK government would fail to bail out a UK high street bank. Therein lies the parallel and the danger of assumption.

If it wasn't bad enough to lose your job, this then happens:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080918/ten-free-theatre-for-lehman-staff-ea4616c.html