Tagged: crisis RSS

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 7:10 am on February 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , crisis   

    Is term ‘a legitimate bank’ an oxymoron? 

    I consider banks as the institutions who lie to us all the time. However these lies are not ones visible at the first sight but rather ones hidden deeply, like in the documents we are asked to sign, which are written in a very formal and not understandable manner.

    I hate these situations when after signing the documents in a bank I check my bank account to find out I misread something and they “robbed” me out of my money. It is interesting to point out that I have never experienced a situation when bank gave me a bonus I didn’t expect. It is always the case they took as much as I have expected or more. The “more” being the more probable case.

    Although I am used to banks not telling us the whole story about interest rates, mortgage costs, money transfer fees and so on, this time I found the polish Alior Bank TV ad to lie in a bit different way:

    This ad tells us that with the Alior Bank card you can take your money from all the cashpoints in the world free of charge. First it shows Krakow’s main square and Floriańska street corner where someone takes money from a cashpoint. The problem is this cashpoint does not exist! I have never seen it there before so I deliberately took a walk to that place to find out a bare wall instead of a cashpoint. Computer generated scenes are popular these days to the extent they drive the reality…

    In the subsequent scene there is another cashpoint presented near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As I will be there this year I will take another walk to find out whether that one is real or fake!

    I hope for a bank which doesn’t lie to me. I don’t know if I ever found one, but I will keep searching.

    PS) Thanks goes to Hubert Gajewski who told me “post it on your blog” once he heard the story.

    UPDATE) We were in Paris in September and didn’t find the cashpoint. Lame, Alior, very lame.

     

    • Dexter 11:47 am on February 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hahah amazing! I really enjoy this kind of fake scenes. :-)

      Unfortunately I enjoy less bank silent actions. How was I surprised seeing yesterday that a “free of charge” action in Deutsche Bank can cost me 15 euros!

    • Alan 2:04 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Nice advert though (even if it’s all based on a lie). I like his bowler hat (or coke hat, if you’re old school) and all the people wearing their hats lining up at the bottom at the end of the ad. Is it normal for bankers to wear bowler hats in Poland too then? Such hats are what, classically, bankers would wear in the City of London (not that you’d see anyone wearing them today, sadly).

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 10:20 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        Even that hats are not worn in real. I think the bank just pretend to be more experienced and long-established than it really is as it was founded in 2008 ;-)

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 2:56 pm on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , crisis, iceland, investment,   

    Thoughts about investment banks 

    I found a really good joke in one of today’s newspapers. It goes like this:
    “What is it: 12 chairmans of investment banks lying at the bottom of the sea? A good start.”

    Little Monty Pythonish, but it clearly shows what people think about banks. Banks that misapplied people trust and earned money in risky businesses, which, in my opinion, was doing something very inappropriate and immoral. 

    Yes, immoral. Sure, the governments may have prevented this situation by forcing banks to follow “good business” rules, but they didn’t. So what is the morality of banks’ chairmans as they allowed this situation to happen? Looks like there is none. They don’t feel responsible for causing the crisis but they actually shed responsibility to people taking credits. But they are so wrong. Who’s business it was to earn money? It was banks’ business. They did it by persuading people the can owe another credit, effectively overheating the market. This is their responsibility and they should pay for it.

    Take a look at Iceland. Bankers invested people money outside the country in very risky interests, effectively dismantling economy of the 8th richest nation in the world. Stock has been closed for over a week, people savings and investments are frozen, and government falling apart. I hope bank bosses will get fired soon without any bonuses paid, or even will go to jail for “frauds”. This should be a “sentence” for risking other people’s money, for forcing us to pay for their mistakes.

    What do you think about it?

     

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