The Tin Pot Bank

It all started back on 17th October last year.

The blogging that is.

And the blogging all started because of my bad experience of the bank which, Enid, a blogging friend with similar frustrations, calls HBSC. She has written two brilliantly funny posts about HBSC.

Similarly, my first ever blog was about HBSC. Like Enid, I am using the heavily disguised name for this particular bank, because I wouldn't want to be accused of libel.

Now with thanks to Enid for pointing out that my comment on her recent blog site should become one of my blogs, I have indeed recreated said comment, with just a few tweaks for all of you to enjoy...........

You see, lots of people gave us tins of chocolates for Christmas, which are now empty. I'm thinking of doing a trade in them, and calling them banks.

It will work like this:

If you want to put some money into one of my tins, you can, on the basis that I can use the money, place it in high interest overnight acounts, and won't give you anything for it.

If you want to write a cheque against the money in the tin, I'll let you, as long as you pay me a nice fee for doing so.

If you don't have enough money in your tin to write a cheque, because I haven't put the new money that you have given me into the tin yet, because it is sitting in a nice high interest overnight account, then I won't pay it for you, but I will charge you £35 for checking to see if there is enough money in the tin.

At the end of the year, I won't pay you any interest on any money that you have left in the tin for me to use, but I will charge you interest on any of the charges that I have charged you for not having enough money. A sort of poor tax.

If you want to start a small business I will give you a sort of loan, which I will call a business overdraft. This will be similar to an overdraft, exept that I will make sure that I charge you a very high fee, several hundred or more (depending on the size of your tin) pounds a year for saying that you can have the business overdraft, and I will make sure that the amount that I lend you is just slightly short of the amount that you actually need.

Then, as I will have very cunningly have made sure that you don't quite have enough money to write a cheque to pay your business bills, I will charge you for that. I will of course charge you more than people who don't have a small business, because they are not as enterprising as you, and so it will be necessary to charge you an enterprise tax too. If I succeed in making sure that your small business fails, I will then charge you a much higher interest rate on any remaining debt to the tin, because by now you would be very poor and therefore you have to pay a bigger poor tax.

Would anyone be interested in one of my tins?