Chase "savings"
by David Atkins
Late capitalism run amok:
If you are a working stiff and can squirrel away $250 to put in a Chase "savings account," Chase will pay you 12.5 cents a year (.05% APY at a "standard rate"). Furthermore, if you don't make any transactions, they will charge you $4 a month, meaning that you will be left with $202 at the end of a year, plus your 2.5 cents.
It's all right here on a Chase website marketing page for what is called "Chase Savings." But a closer look at the fees and disclosures page indicates that if you are a consumer not used to reading the footnotes, you could end up losing your savings through add-on fees (including potentially the $4 a month "service" fee).
The oligarchy doesn't keep its money at Chase we bet, at least in savings accounts. We doubt that JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has a standard savings account at his own firm, the parent company of Chase. Why? Because according to the Chase rate chart, any sucker who puts $5 million into even the premium "Chase Savings Plus" still only gets .15% interest. To break that down, that would equal a $150.00 return on every $100,000 lent to Chase each year. Do you think Dimon is a master of the universe with those kind of investment returns?
We call savings at Chase lending because the bank takes your money and charges credit card holders up to around 30%, yielding enormous profits at your expense and the indebtedness of the credit card holders. Meanwhile, you end up as a "good" American saver with literally pennies in interest on your nest egg. Consumer savers at banks like Chase are paying for providing the banks to big to fail with the capital to lend out funds at usurious interest rates for a variety of purposes -- or financing their risky investment ventures.
For most of history in the post-classical Western world, this sort of thing would have been flatly illegal. In the ancient Western world there were fewer controls on interest rates, but their impact was blunted by regular bouts of debt forgiveness, and the ever-present threat that the rulers of the day could simply impound the assets of the lender.
It's important to realize that allowing financial institutions to perpetrate this sort of savage usury on people with the full support of their government is a relatively novel modern phenomenon. It was not always so. It was not usually so.
And there will come a day again when it is illegal and treated with the same scorn that we reserve for slavery and child labor today.
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