Jan 29
Sunday

Why are we in this mess?

We are in the current economic situation because of excessive lending over the last few years.

What is the government's preferred solution? To drop interest rates to ridiculously low levels and to force the banks to continue to lend at unsustainable levels.  That's about as sensible as offering a drug addict cheaper heroin and forcing the dealers to supply as much as the addict wants.

Who is being punished?

Savers!! The people who are prudently saving for their retirement or living off their savings.

The problem is not the cost of lending. it is the availability of lending. Ask yourself a simple question "Who provides the funds to lenders?" - the answer is simple, SAVERS. So why make it less attractive to savers at the very time you need them?

Next - 0% Interest Rates?

The spectre of ZERO% interest rates is looming and that is not funny.

Its time the down trodden saver did something. To date we've had no power but this website aims to change this.

Have you had enough? PDF Print E-mail

Its time the down trodden saver did something. To date we've had no power but this website aims to change this.

If we group together we may have the power to achieve what we want.

What we want is simple:

  • A fair real rate of interest on our deposits at all times :  inflation + 3%
  • Higher protection levels from the deposit protection scheme : £250,000 per depositor per institution (why?)
  • The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee to:
    • target average inflation over a period of time (why?)
    • ensure that banks and building societies keep all contingent liabilities on-balance sheet. In other words mortgages can not be securitised for part of their lives (why?)
 
What can we do as savers? PDF Print E-mail

We can "go on strike".

When a company mistreats its employees the victims have the option of withdrawing their labour. What can savers do when they are mistreated? We can withdraw our deposits! Unfortunately individual savers are too small to be noticed so we need to act together for our collective benefit.

Clearly, we can't withdraw our money from all offending institutions since most of our banks and building societies are following the instructions of the government and the Bank of England.

What we can do, is to put them all (and the Bank of England) under notice that we intend to withdraw our deposits completely from a randomly selected institution.
 
How would this work? PDF Print E-mail
  • SaversOnStrike will write to all the major banks and building societies, on behalf of participants, to encourage them to offer accounts with reasonable rates of interest
  • Any institutions that do not offer a rate of interest of at least "inflation + 3%" (currently this equates to 5.4% based on January 2009 RPIX of 2.4%) by a published deadline, will be added to a list of "offending institutions"
  • Immediately after the deadline, all SaversOnStrike participants will be notified of a randomly selected "offending institution" and will move all their deposits from this organisation to another
  • Each month thereafter another "offending institution" will be selected at random for similar treatment
  • This will continue until savers are given a fair deal