Time to move my money? I wonder.

[FunkyDexter]

So it sounds like the co-operative are going to pull out of banking. Can you guess who my business account is with? Yep, that's right.

Thing is, the pull out isn't certain yet and if they do pull out it's going to be in a controlled way (it's a business decision rather than a collapse) and I do rather like banking with them. I like their ethical aproach and their staff are always really freindly and helpful (though their systems appear to be straight from the 1970s). But it's not beyond posibility that, as this rumour spreads, everyone could start taking their money out and cause a run. That's unlikely but ya' never know.

Hmmm, quandry, quandry, quandry. Time to get some proper advice I think.

[abhijit]

Yes, always pull out in time.

[FunkyDexter]

Wait... are we still talking about money?

I don't know, I'm inclined to stick with them until they officially anounce they're pulling out of the industry because I like doing busines with them and it's only speculation at the moment. I believe my money is protected anyway. There's a scheme in the UK where the government guarantees your deposits up to a certain amount, I believe it's 80 or 90 thousand... somewhere around there. I'm doing pretty well for myself but not that well (mores the pity). I need to find out for certain whether I'm protected by that as a business rather than an individual and whether the co-op bank is covered (I could imagine that as a co-operative rather than a public business they may come under different rules - I don't think so but I'd like to know for sure). As long as I'm protected I'll probably stick.

That said, there were lots of rumblings about abandoning those types of schemes following the Cypress debacle so I guess nothing is certain.

[abhijit]

There's always some hare-brained scheme dreamed up by Government lackeys and elected politicians that may or may not protect your investment.
It's your money. If things were to go south, you would spend a lot of time filling up forms in triplicate (oh wait, we are now in the Internet era, so perhaps 1 form as long as you get to submit it!)

Wait... are we still talking about money?

I don't know, I'm inclined to stick with them until they officially anounce they're pulling out of the industry because I like doing busines with them and it's only speculation at the moment. I believe my money is protected anyway. There's a scheme in the UK where the government guarantees your deposits up to a certain amount, I believe it's 80 or 90 thousand... somewhere around there. I'm doing pretty well for myself but not that well (mores the pity). I need to find out for certain whether I'm protected by that as a business rather than an individual and whether the co-op bank is covered (I could imagine that as a co-operative rather than a public business they may come under different rules - I don't think so but I'd like to know for sure). As long as I'm protected I'll probably stick.

That said, there were lots of rumblings about abandoning those types of schemes following the Cypress debacle so I guess nothing is certain.

[homer13j]

The solution is quite simple, really. Send all your money to me and I'll do all the worrying about it so you no longer have to.

[Witis]

Now that sounds like an offer too good to refuse!

[Spoo]

Funky

I'd imagine you guys have something akin to the FDIC (as you surmised),
but I was more thinking about you contacting them and posing the
scenario of your co-op exiting the business.

> at least confirm the deposits are protected
> there may be mechanisms where another co-op or a bank "buys out" your co-op
> they (the FDIC blokes) may have seen this kind of thing before

Spoo

[homer13j]

A very good day to you, Mr. Dexter.

My name is Farouk Bakoh, a Solicitor/Notary public, and very active in the legal practice in Nigeria. I am also an in-law to the late President, General Sanni Abacha. Now General Abacha is dead, and Mohammed the first son is facing a lot of persecution due to his involvement in anti pro democracy activities during the rule of his late father. Also there are alleged fraud activities that Mohamed has been linked to with the father and, the government of today is after the family to recover everything. They have claimed all the family's wealth and I am making this contact on behalf of my sister, Mrs. Miriam Abacha, the wife, not minding the consequences, but hoping that you would understand our predicament hence the need for your urgent assistance and co-operation.

My aim of contacting you is to crave your indulgence to assist us in securing some funds, abroad for safe keeping which incidentally is part of the family wealth. Fortunately with my immediate assistance, and contact, we were able to deposit the money in a security vault abroad pending when the whole situation will be calm. However, this security company does not have any knowledge of the content of the deposit, because it was done in the guise that the trunk contains precious stones. But owing the great risk we run presently due the new Democratic government's initiative to freeze and recover all monies supposedly misappropriated by the late President, we wish to relocate this fund in a foreigner's name to avoid any trace. Now that we are in a democratic government, this is our opportunity to remove the money, and we are willing to offer you 15% of the funds after the transaction for your co-operation. All I need from you is an assurance that you can handle the amount involved comfortably and that I can also trust you with this very arrangement.

Be rest assured that there is no risk involved since I have taken care of everything. I want you to immediately inform me of your willingness in assisting and co-operating with us, so that I can send you full details of this transaction and let us make arrangement for a meeting and discuss at length on how to transfer this funds. Also furnish me with your private e-mail address, Tel/Fax Numbers (Private) for a personal contact with you. Finally, I am trusting on your full understanding on this, hoping that there will be absolute confidentiality.

Awaiting with interest your response and hoping to develop good business relationship with you.

Yours sincerely,

Farouk Bakoh

[Witis]

Perhaps move your money to Cyprus, I've been hearing good things about them lately!

[Witis]

Go with your gut, if you feel as though you want to stay then stay.

What does your gut say Dex??

[dilettante]

Is it legal to own bullion coins in the UK?

Maybe pull out excess and move it into Gold Sovereigns, Canadian Maple Leafs, or Aussie Kangaroo Nuggets and start filling up a sock with them. Of course the downside is the brokerage fee involved in both buying and liquidating them.

[Witis]

Also you can't go past collectible comics, some of them are worth a fortune!

[Spoo]

McDonald's has started offering Kangaroo McNuggets recently ... quite tastey, I hear.

[Witis]

Good luck trying to get a Kangaroo to eat them!

[Shaggy Hiker]

McDonald's has started offering Kangaroo McNuggets recently ... quite tastey, I hear.

They're just trying to get the jump on the competition, and hoping for a bounce in sales. They're also hoping you'll en-joey them and not find them too roo'd.

[Shaggy Hiker]

@homer31j,
I don't know if post 8 was meant as a joke or something, but I reported it. Scam, scam, scam.

Can't be, it's too well written. I was thinking it might be based on one or two phrases, but it's way too grammatically correct to be an authentic Nigerian letter.

[Witis]

Mine says redfish with some rice pilaf.

I also enjoy a meal of Emperor red snapper from time to time :drool:

[FunkyDexter]

What does your gut say Dex??

That rather depends on what I've eaten. Last night it was Chilli so: "gurgle, grumble, pfft"

Anyway, the Co-Op has anounced that it's not going to pull out of banking. They have decided not to buy the Lloyds branches they were being offered but they're sticking with their current customer base "for the long term".

Just to clarify, the co-op was never unstable or in danger of collapse. There were just rumours that they might make a business decision to move out of the banking sector. The Co-Op is actually pretty strong and the rumours began because they recently decided not to take on a bunch of Lloyds branches and customers that Lloyds were being forced to get rid of as part of a government mandated break up (the thinking is that Lloyds is too big and comes close to representing a monopoly). Given that the Lloyds branches were essentially being given to them for free, and that the capitalisation levels of those branches was actually stronger than co-ops existing network, and that a couple of the co-op directors had made comments about increased legislation making the banking sector an increasingly difficult area to make money... well there started to be speculation that the co-op might be getting ready to get out of the sector entirely. If that happened it was pretty certain that they'd do so in a controlled manner, either selling their assets (including my account) to another branch or perhaps just not taking on new customers and allowing their banking division to atrophy slowly.

My concern was that, no matter how controlled the co-op plans might be, if a large number of their customers miss-interpreted the speculation and thought that the co-op were actually in trouble, they could all start to panic and actually create the very situation they were concerned about.

Anyway, since the co-op have declared they're not getting out of the sector I'm definitely leaving my account with them. I generally haven't had very good experience with banks (particularly Lloyds who once tried to take me to court after they paid out on a cancelled direct debit from an account I'd closed with them almost a year previously... that was quite special) and the general behaviour of our banks recently has... erm... not been very good so the co-ops customer focused aproach and ethical policies hold a lot of value to me.

[dee-u]

You can get your money here in my country and be rich until you retire.

[Witis]

Well that sounds like a false alarm, there is nothing to worry about, no reason to consider other safer options, don't panic!

[homer13j]

@homer31j,
I don't know if post 8 was meant as a joke or something, but I reported it. Scam, scam, scam.

Attachment 99433

The fact that I've been here since '03 and only have 65 posts outside of chit-chat doesn't give you a clue?

Yet another reason I stopped posting here: nobody has a sense of humor anymore. Except Kregg.

[FunkyDexter]

nobody has a sense of humor anymore.

I assumed that DDay was joking too but who knows. Either way I found it funny. Believe it or not I actually met Sanni Abacha when I was in Nigeria. He wasn't a very nice man.

Except Kregg

Nah, Kregg stopped being funny when he broke his addiction to lolcats

[Shaggy Hiker]

Gee, I met the wrong guy. I met Sanni Tation by mistake. He was very clean.

[Witis]

Gee, I met the wrong guy. I met Sanni Tation by mistake.

You met the wrong guy - how much of a downer was that????

[Witis]

The fact that I've been here since '03 and only have 65 posts outside of chit-chat doesn't give you a clue?

Yet another reason I stopped posting here: nobody has a sense of humor anymore. Except Kregg.

Perhaps it is a black cat thingy, aren't they considered bad luck?
Often used as an anarchist symbol eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbol

[FunkyDexter]

Gee, I met the wrong guy. I met Sanni Tation by mistake. He was very clean.

Really?! I think I once met his brother, Moti Vation, but he just passed me by without stopping to talk. He was mumbling somthing about AI and girlfreinds.

[dilettante]

You can get your money here in my country and be rich until you retire.

"Until you retire?"

Sort of a Logan's Run policy there or what?

[InvisibleDuncan]

Is it legal to own bullion coins in the UK?

Maybe pull out excess and move it into Gold Sovereigns, Canadian Maple Leafs, or Aussie Kangaroo Nuggets and start filling up a sock with them. Of course the downside is the brokerage fee involved in both buying and liquidating them.

The gold price isn't doing terribly well at the moment; I've taken a bit of a hit on it lately. Mind you, since I bought the UK's gold reserve from Gordon Brown at US$275 per ounce, the fact that it's tumbled to $1,500 per ounce in the past week or so isn't too much of a worry.

[InvisibleDuncan]

So it sounds like the co-operative are going to pull out of banking. Can you guess who my business account is with? Yep, that's right.

They may not have pulled out of banking, but I hear they've just had their rating downgraded, their chief executive has resigned and there are rumours that they're in need of a government bailout - which is ironic as they're a major donor to the Labour party.

Maybe you should have got out when you were thinking about it.

[FunkyDexter]

Crud. I go away for the weekend and come back to my fears being made real. Looks like I'll be shopping around for an alternative this week then.

[Witis]

As another option I have heard that some medical trials pay oodles of quids!

[NeedSomeAnswers]

Crud. I go away for the weekend and come back to my fears being made real. Looks like I'll be shopping around for an alternative this week then.

Funky to be honest you don't really have anything to worry about unless you have more than £85,000 deposited with them, as under new regulations the first £85,000 of savings for each customer is now protected by law.

Even then the CO OP parent group is just huge and is just very unlikely to let the bank fail, see below!!

So should those customers be anxious about Moody's downgrade?
Well there is no reason to believe that their savings are seriously at risk of incurring losses. As Co-op says today, it has plenty of cash or liquidity to hand - I understand it has a cash liquidity buffer of £3bn.

Also, the parent group is huge, with assets of £82bn and cash not far off £7bn. If the worse came to the worst, there is plenty of other stuff that could be sold, to provide additional capital to the bank.

[SJWhiteley]

Funky to be honest you don't really have anything to worry about unless you have more than £85,000 deposited with them, as under new regulations the first £85,000 of savings for each customer is now protected by law.

...

As, I am sure, the Cypriots money was, too.

The 'protected by law' thing means nothing. The 'protection' scheme is simply designed to protect the depositor from depositing their money with a scam artist. Since the government, doing the protecting, has a vested interest in the bank, they created regulations to protect themselves from having to make such a payout, through regulation ... and so on. This is insurance. And, as we know, the insurance industry is a stand-up pillar of the economic community. The very nature of insurance favors the grantor of the insurance.

The reality is to examine the capitol and cash of your 'investment'. That is, do they actually have your money, or is it invested in a get rich quick scheme?

[NeedSomeAnswers]

As, I am sure, the Cypriots money was, too.

The 'protected by law' thing means nothing. The 'protection' scheme is simply designed to protect the depositor from depositing their money with a scam artist. Since the government, doing the protecting, has a vested interest in the bank, they created regulations to protect themselves from having to make such a payout, through regulation ... and so on. This is insurance. And, as we know, the insurance industry is a stand-up pillar of the economic community. The very nature of insurance favors the grantor of the insurance.

The reality is to examine the capitol and cash of your 'investment'. That is, do they actually have your money, or is it invested in a get rich quick scheme?

Cyprus is a bit of a different case, their banks were 3 times the size of there whole economy, which is clearly not sustainable. So when they went bust there wasn't enough money in the whole of Cyprus to cover the losses. The UK while over reliant on banking it still is only about 20 % of our economy.

Anyway regardless of compensation schemes the CO OP group which owns the CO OP Bank is huge and very profitable with something like £7 billion just sitting in the bank, they are no more likely to go bust than China is right now.

[InvisibleDuncan]

Cyprus is a bit of a different case, their banks were 3 times the size of there whole economy, which is clearly not sustainable. So when they went bust there wasn't enough money in the whole of Cyprus to cover the losses.

The biggest problem with the Cypriot banks was that they were encouraged (by the EU) to lend to Greece. When the Greeks defaulted, it had a devastating effect on them.

Up until then, their banking industry was swinging along very happily.

[FunkyDexter]

I'm still sticking with them for now but I've got admit I'm getting edgy. I'm 99% sure I'm fine because of the guarantee scheme but following the Cypress meltdown there were pundits on the radio seriously touting that we might drop the guarantees. There was alot of "you need to understand that a deposit is an investment and it's not a government's place to guarantee investments" sort of talk. I think that's unfair because while a deposit in a bank is technically an investment that's not the way the vast majority of think of our bank account. It's a place where we put our money because we want it to be safe and we don't really have a choice about having a bank account if we want to operate in a modern society. It's not about trying make more money in the same way an investment is. Anyway, that's an aside really because it was mostly just hot air I think.

The biggest problem with the Cypriot banks was that they were encouraged (by the EU) to lend to Greece

Yeah, that's something that really annoyed me. Germany in particular were pushing them to lend to Greece and then turned round and called them irresponsible for doing so.

[NeedSomeAnswers]

I'm still sticking with them for now but I've got admit I'm getting edgy. I'm 99% sure I'm fine because of the guarantee scheme but following the Cypress meltdown there were pundits on the radio seriously touting that we might drop the guarantees. There was alot of "you need to understand that a deposit is an investment and it's not a government's place to guarantee investments" sort of talk. I think that's unfair because while a deposit in a bank is technically an investment that's not the way the vast majority of think of our bank account. It's a place where we put our money because we want it to be safe and we don't really have a choice about having a bank account if we want to operate in a modern society. It's not about trying make more money in the same way an investment is. Anyway, that's an aside really because it was mostly just hot air I think.

Yeah, that's something that really annoyed me. Germany in particular were pushing them to lend to Greece and then turned round and called them irresponsible for doing so.

FD Chill out man, the Co- Op group is absolutely wedged even without the financial guarantee they have plenty of money/assets they can use to sort out the Bank and so your money is very unlikely to be at risk. For the CO-OP Group to let the CO-OP Bank go to the wall would be terrible business for them and would probably break all there own rules on ethical business.

[FunkyDexter]

Yeah, you're probably right. Like I said, I'm 99% sure they're fine. The stories are slowly getting worse but it's very slowly and I'm pretty confident I'd have plenty of time to jump if I really needed to.

[Witis]

Don't forget the classic -> pull all of your cash out and put it into your mattress!!!

[FunkyDexter]

My matress isn't big enough