>>>Everything under 10% loss - however short the time span - is nothing compared to the effect of that bubble bursting.
>>
>>Yes.
>>Ten years of near-zero interest rates here have done the same.
>>For a while, some banks were actually charging people for depositing money into accounts.
>
>Really? wow - if my bank ever tried to do that I would of withdrawn everything out of my account and closed it on the spot :)

During my working years I had to deal with about dozen banks, and believe me there was perhaps one of them (and that was in the years of socialism) which didn't pull a dirty trick to lay its hands on my money. If I add to what happened to wife's and childrens' dealings with them, the percentage goes worse (i.e. more banks and only one exception - and even that one is suspect, maybe I just don't remember).
In SFRY - I've seen
- the bank shuffling the dates of the checks I wrote, so the day the check was cached became the date check was written. That meant that the reports I was getting during the year were worthless, they'd show me always in the black; now there were days when I was in the red and was charged interest
- they'd charge for those reports; the reports were slips of paper with only nine line items; the tenth line was the charge for the report, but now there were two of them, twice the charge
- we took a loan and moved all the money into the account of a cooperative within the hour; they still charged us with 15 days of "intercalar interest" for the time the money was laying idle. Why 15? Because they didn't take the date we started using the money, but the arbitrary period between issuing the loan and the day they looked at the reports - which where scheduled 15 days apart, as a rule.
In Hungary, we used cash only (salary, office buying hardware etc) because the banks then guaranteed the money would arrive at the target account within 15 days.
In the US, Wachovia
- whatever I pay would leave the account in 10 minutes; when I deposit a check, it would not clear until the next day; if it was a friday, on monday (unless monday was a banking holiday)
- the so-called electronic payment is an actual physical check, printed on (electronic!) printer and sent via snail mail; once in a while the four days I gave it would not be enough and then I'd have to argue for months that I wasn't in the arrears with my payment, having a bank report to prove that I paid four days before the deadline. Wachovia eventually confessed (on the phone only!)... well not really, they just asked how much fine was I due and 65$ magically appeared on my account, with no explanation.
- once I was close to zero and had to buy some stuff on a friday; the check didn't clear until monday; they automatically pulled from my line of credit (not savings! - I had money there), charged me 5$ for the transaction (would have been for free had I done it myself) and charged me interest for the three days. I recalculated the amount (having written interest calculation at least a dozen times for various banking and contractual apps) into percentage - it was a whopping 90% annually. Plus the 5$. They caught me when I wasn't watching what they were doing - and I wasn't aware that I should watch them.
- Once I had some € and couldn't find an exchange office (in a resort city!) so I went to the bank. They had to send it to their HQ to do that, took ten days, they skimmed about 15% off the exchange rate.
Credit union:
- they had no office in Virginia Beach, but I could use one of the service centers. I'd take my check to deposit, and the service center would keep it for 5 days. Which, after a year or so, they shortened to 11 days - mind you, not ordinary days, banking days. Then I started caching the check in Wachovia across the street and just bringing the cash.
- When we moved from US to Serbia, I announced it by phone (knowing they'd call me whenever I spent more than 50$ abroad, like when I was buying software), and they said OK but it's too early, I should call just a couple of days before the trip. Which I did and then they told me I can't use the card in Serbia - but you told me it's OK - you said you're traveling to Europe - well thanks for proving all stereotypes about Americans and geography, Serbia is in Europe for more than thousand years now. So why? Ah, the FICA law, it's on the list. I checked the FICA site, and Serbia was mentioned only once - in 2006, when GW2B signed the decree to take it OFF the list.
- so we tried to get the money out, but, heh, it's 100 miles away and they close within two hours. I got... traveller's checks.
In Serbia:
- travellers' checks used to be the easy way to carry money abroad; just 12 years before that I saw them cached by a clerk in a tourist agency within minutes, with just a receipt. Now it took me weeks to just find a bank which would even accept them, and then it took oodles of paperwork (the guy would have to retype both serial numbers, photocopy everything both sides, including my passport) and could do only ten checks at a time. Took me more than a month, and guess what, when I brought the last batch, they changed the rules - the checks would have to be temporarily deposited. So see you on monday? Nope, a whole month. They sent me to another bank across the street, where I did get them cached, but it took four hours - the clerk had to retype all the serial numbers into an email, send them to HQ, wait for response - ah, not that, the other number, repeat. Took four hours.

And don't get me started about Paypal. They alone are a sufficient reason to bring Kafka from the dead.