The Sub-Zero Club: Getting Used to the Upside-Down World Economy

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• I'm glad I'm old. I don't want to see this world in fifty years.

• Only a matter of time before they start giving savers "haircuts" to help pay off the debt these greedy assholes created.

• This push has been going on for years. Why do you think so many employers and the gooberment insist on using direct deposit instead of writing you a check? Social Security no longer sends checks, I get my payment via direct deposit every month. My last employer didn't write checks, they pay with direct deposit only. More and more companies are insisting that their employees have a checking or savings account just for that purpose and there isn't really much we can do about it.

  • Yep. The push for a cashless society has been going on all over for awhile. Eventually, your "money" will be nothing but 1s and 0s on a computer screen. The bank makes some bad bets, they get bailed out and you get fvcked. When TSHTF in Greece, they went ahead and did a "bail in".Savers with a certain amount in the bank ceded it to the government for the banks for the "good of the banks and the economy." If people don't think that can happen here, they've got their head up their a$$.

• How soon before the Media/Entertainment complex begin to mock savers as 'reactionaries' and ' traitors'?

  This negative interest push is also behind the movement to eliminate cash. Beware...

• I'll opt for the safe. The day I pay a bank to use my money to make more money, is the day I close all but my checking account, and only put enough money in it to pay whatever bills I have to send off or pay online.

  • As soon as my retirement and SS checks hit my account I take all of it out in cash. Other than what I need to pay my few monthly bills anyway.

  • I already do this. My savings account interest rate is so low, I couldn't tell you what it is. The only reason I have one is to get the "preferred checking" account and it's minuscule perks. In order to get preferred checking, they do a monthly transfer from checking to savings. It's around $175. As soon as that savings acct hits 600 bucks or if I need it, I transfer it back to checking!

    Any other liquidity is parked in my MM attached to a brokerage account. It has a better interest rate (barely) than my regular bank.

    I'm still pissed about the interest free loan I floated the government this year. Last year, I got my deductions dialed in to where I had to pay them exactly 10 dollars on April 15th! And I waited until the 15th to send my return. This year I got a $2500 credit because my oldest started college. I wasn't aware of this credit and as such, I got a 3100 dollar refund this year. Not the end of the world, but the principle of it all rubs me wrong. That's $250 bucks I could've used or invested every month; instead, some other asshole that doesn't work, was using my money all year to buy beer. Argh!! I'll just have to tell myself the $$ was used for bullets to kill jihadis instead of supplying some peckerwood with Keystone Light and Busch.

  • It's the continuation of the forty year trend towards encouraging indebtedness/borrowing and punishing savers. I still remember a time when banks would advertise higher savings rate to get people to bank with them. Now they advertise lower borrowing rates to get people to borrow from them.

    Borrow, borrow, borrow so you can spend, spend. spend citizen. After all, they have to keep up the farcical notion that the economy is healthy