Goldman Sachs Launches GS Bank, An Internet Bank With A $1 Minimum Deposit (techcrunch.com) 190
An anonymous reader recaps a report from TechCrunch: Traditionally, Goldman Sachs has functioned like a run-of-the-mill investment bank with minimums to open an account in the range of $10 million, and returns not guaranteed. Goldman is opening its doors to the masses today with the launch of GS Bank, an FDIC-insured, internet-based savings bank. Anyone with an internet connection and a dollar can join, as that is what each account's minimum balance must be. GS Bank's interest rates give customers an annual yield of 1.05 percent, a rate that trumps the average U.S. saving's bank yield of .06 percent APY. GS Bank was a result of Goldman's acquisition of GE Capital Bank, the online retail bank previously run by General Electric's capital arm. The move is to diversify revenue streams and strengthen liquidity. GS Bank currently has total deposits of around $114 billion. In other news from the multinational banking firm, Goldman Sachs believes virtual-reality and augmented-reality "will be the next generation computing platform" worth $80 billion by 2025.
Ooooh~~ (Score:5, Insightful)
Synonym with trustworthiness and financial stability. Just exactly where I want to put all my money in!
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Goldman Sachs! Synonym with trustworthiness and financial stability.
GS had enough sense to short the sub-prime mortgage market when everyone else was digging in deeper. So they aren't dumb.
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why did they need the bailout then?
Re: Ooooh~~ (Score:1)
Who says they needed it? They did?
You believed that? Well isn't that special.
Re:Ooooh~~ (Score:5, Insightful)
why did they need the bailout then?
GS did not need a bailout. Their customers/victims did. They received some TARP money, but they certainly didn't need it.
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They received some TARP money, but they certainly didn't need it.
Goldman Sachs was made 100% whole by U.S. taxpayers via their customers and victims.
Prior to 2008, Goldman Sachs was hardly a household name, but on Wall Street this investment bank is arguably the most powerful non-government bank in the world. Nobody thought that a bank of this size could be brought down, almost overnight. It happened, however, and along with an investment by Warren Buffett, Goldman Sachs received $10 billion in TARP funds. Using funds raised from a $5 billion stock offering, Goldman Sachs paid back TARP funds less than one year later, but in the end, tax payers made $1.4 billion.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/investopedia/2012/05/23/4-tarp-recipients-that-made-a-profit [forbes.com]
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Of course they shorted it. They helped architect the whole thing.
Re:Ooooh~~ (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they shorted it because they set up the whole thing to fail in the first place.
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Fuck Goldman right in the Sachs (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, these are the "masters of the universe" that tanked our economy, was bailed out for 10s of billions of dollars [economicpo...ournal.com] after their CEO became the treasury secretary [wikipedia.org], the
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No high level execs at Goldman Sachs went to jail
Which GS people committed which crimes for which they should be in prison? Please be specific.
Why would I give even even a penny to admitted criminals
Which officials with GS admitted to which crimes? Be specific.
You certainly don't have to do business with them. But if you have evidence of specific crimes that nobody else has managed to identify, you might want to pass those along to the DoJ.
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So tell me, how's the bonus structure work at GS's customer relations department?
But if you have evidence of specific crimes that nobody else has managed to identify, you might want to pass those along to the DoJ.
Yeah, umm, the DoJ has already weighed in [justice.gov] and GS already admitted to wrongdoing, so... y'know... nice try. There's more here [vice.com], and in the 90,000 other articles that have been written about GS over the years. Goldman Sachs is a pretty high profile company and their activities are very well documen
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Re:Fuck Goldman right in the Sachs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Fuck Goldman right in the Sachs (Score:5, Informative)
You certainly don't have to do business with them. But if you have evidence of specific crimes that nobody else has managed to identify, you might want to pass those along to the DoJ.
There's no need to inform the DoJ. Goldman says that it did commit the crimes it was accused of. This statement is part of the settlement and rather unusual as most of the banks were allowed to settle with a "neither agree nor disagree" kind of statement.
This note from the Justice department has some details of specific crimes.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr... [justice.gov]
Re:Fuck Goldman right in the Sachs (Score:5, Informative)
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO. See the presentence investigative report on him and Goldman from 2010.
He traded against his clients, which is a crime. Then he lied to the FBI and Congress about doing so. That's conflict of interest, fraud and perjury.
Now it's up to you to explain why he should NOT have gone to jail for these crimes other than the fact that Goldman controls the Fed. Please be specific.
http://www.rollingstone.com/po... [rollingstone.com]
http://www.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]
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If you have enough money to pay for your crimes, you just pay your way out of the US justice system with settlements.
Unless that's not the case, and you've done something criminal while working, and you get charged with a crime and you go to jail. Which happens regularly even amongst very well-off circles. Why? Because when individuals do crimes, especially in industries that leave a huge paper trail, the evidence doesn't go away. So, instead of generalities, name the names of the people at GS who committed specific crimes, and name the crimes that the DoJ decided not to charge those individual people with. You know, sin
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Re:Which rock did you crawl out from under? (Score:5, Insightful)
What should have happened is every employee above a certain pay grade should have been brought up on RICO charges and the corporation itself should have lost its charter and been dissolved.
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In addition, target investigations do not work well against systemic problems. If a company decides to skirt close to the edge of the law (using tactics such as regulatory capture) and fuck everyone over, the net result is a negative on society but the culprits can get by with a little han
Re:Ooooh~~ (Score:5, Interesting)
You think GS is bad. Here is my experience with a Delaware-based escrow company.
Before I start, the main function of an Escrow company is to hold the money and pay it out to the correct people and only at the appropriate time.
1. Money is in escrow. Intended to be held for some time with some conditions on release.
2. One of the conditions on release of money puts payment in jeopardy.
3. Escrow company sends one of the parties their share BEFORE the money should be sent to anyone and before the issue from step 2 is resolved.
4. Escrow company sues the recipient (who is in India with no US connections) in US courts. Obtains a meaningless default judgement.
5. Escrow company deducts the cost of obtaining the meaningless judgement from the amount to be shared amongst the rest of the escrow participants.
6. One of the participants successfully sues the escrow company to force it to eat the legal bill (and any excess money sent in error in step 3.) itself.
7. Escrow company adds its legal costs defending 6. to the amount deducted from the other participants (except for the one who sued).
8. Other participants sue the escrow company to get it to eat all its legal costs and any excess sent in error to the one participant in step 3. Suit is successful and eventually, the Escrow company has to agree to not deduct any legal costs and make up any excess money sent in step 3.
In summary, escrow company screwed up, tried to pass the costs onto the very people it should have protected and had to be sued twice to get it to eat the costs of its own mistakes.
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Bob wants Eve to send him an office chair. Instead of sending Eve the money first, or asking her to send the chair before he sends the money, he offers to have Alice hold the money in escrow. When Bob confirms he has the chair (the condition), Alice will release the money to Eve.
Instead of an office chair, Eve sends Bob a package containing a bobcat. This failure to meet the criteria puts the escrow payment in jeopardy.
Relevant links:
https://xkcd.com/325/ [xkcd.com]
http [xkcd.com]
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Goldman Sachs! Synonym with trustworthiness and financial stability. Just exactly where I want to put all my money in!
Their ToS is actually quite reasonable. It includes a clause allowing you to opt out of arbitration. Therefore you can sue the pants off of them if they try anything shady.
diversify revenue streams and strengthen liquidit (Score:1)
Subject: " diversify revenue streams and strengthen liquidity"
AKA steal your money with hidden fees on top of fees and then sell your zombie debt to a subsidiary for a loss to mask profits. Maybe as a new CZDO they can bundle and market to retirees along with reverse mortgages and high fee sub par rate annuities.
Oh, and the "strengthen liquidity" bit means take your savings to Vegas. Just kidding, they hit Atlantic City by chopper. Flights are for Macaw.
I got a bad feeling about this... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... the same corporation that was responsible for the Great Recession.
GS did not cause the Great Recession. If more banks had done what GS had done, the recession would have happened sooner, and been more mild. Blaming short sellers for crashes is like blaming storms on the weathervane.
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Blaming short sellers for crashes is like blaming storms on the weathervane.
Let's focus on the short sellers. Pay no attention to the sucking sound from Goldman Sachs in the background.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 [rollingstone.com]
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Has it occurred to you that maybe that's not the most reliable source?
I read the book, "Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America" by Matt Taibbi. Many other books on the Great Recession confirmed the details in that book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griftopia [wikipedia.org]
Didn't look good in "The Big Short" (Score:3, Interesting)
Goldman didn't look good in the movie the Big Short.
MIchael Burry, the fund manager who "discovered" how bad mortgage backed bonds were due to poor lending practices, bought hedges against these bonds from Goldman to the tune of at least a hundred million dollars. They thought he was an idiot and sold them willingly.
Yet when the default rate skyrocketed and should have made the hedges he bought greatly increase in value they kept acting like the hedges hadn't increased in value, basically ignoring the defa
*anyone* or just US residents? (Score:2)
I'd be looking at the fine print as far as taxation goes before parking any money there.
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I'm an aussie that lives/works in the US.
I get like 4% interest in my NZ bank account, so..... whatever GS?
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Victorian who lives in Victoria - I think my online saver still gets 3%, down from 6% before the GFC :(
I wasn't thinking about the interest rate, more the AUD/USD conversion. When our dollars were at parity a few years ago I took a vacation to CDN/USA. If our currency did head upwards again I wondered about buying a hundred Benjamins for my next trip. i.e. lock in $10,000 at 90c and live well for a couple of months even if our own currency plummets back to 60c. (Also useful for countries where the US dollar
They also believed Greece would be ... (Score:1)
I'd even trust Bitcoin before Goldman Sachs - ok that's going a bit far, but what Goldman Sachs say is often very different to what they do.
Predicting yesterday's future today (Score:2)
I went to the Hitachi stand at a show in 1988 and tried out their 3D goggles - they believed virtual reality was the future and they have actually done something over the years to make it happen. Goldman Sachs on the other hand are predicting it after it's already in video game consoles FFS!
Ghee... (Score:2)
feed the big one's again... Go to your local Credit Union and leave your $$'s near where you live!
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So I can get 0.05% at Boeing's credit union? No thanks. Why would I do that when GS pays 21 times more?
Because "savings" accounts are an awful deal if you're trying to actually make money off of the interest. If you have $10k that you can let sit in your savings account for 5 years, at a 1.05% APY you will make about $500 in that time. Tell you what, I'll give you that $500 up front if you let me hold on to that $10k for five years. Does that sound like a good deal now?
A savings/checking account is just a place to store your money on hand so that somebody can't break into your house and take it all. Go stick your money in a Roth IRA or a 401(k) instead if you actually want to save.
But "savings" accounts are great for getting a trickle of bonus while you park some of your cash you need for liquidity purposes. I'd rather get $500 over that 5 year period than $25.
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> "Tell you what, I'll give you that $500 up front if you let me hold on to that $10k for five years. Does that sound like a good deal now?"
No...? Because that isn't describing a savings account, that's describing a CD, which has justifiably higher rates than savings accounts...?
A savings account is a place to store your money on hand, yes. And I'd rather it generate more money than *not* as much money, cause, duh. (Also, Roth IRA and 401k contributions are both capped, so those are only remotely relevan
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AR vs VR (Score:1)
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Really? Personally, I've found the more advanced tech gets, the less reason there is to leave my chair.
Introduction video (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DT7bX-B1Mg
To sum up what I fully expect out of this (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm honestly surprised nobody posted it before.
I don't need this (Score:2)
We have Indian casinos nearby. /sarc?
Nice... (Score:2)
Anyone with an internet connection and a dollar.. (Score:2)
Where values of anyone are restricted to people in the USA....
Note: Account Owners must be at least 18 years old and must be a U.S. citizen or legal resident.
Obligatory: Aaaand. . . it's gone! (Score:2)
Quoting Southpark (Score:1)
GS:
Aaand it's gone...
Why not? (Score:2)
What could possible go wrong?
It's not like they haven't coughed to actively and willfully screwing investors for their own gain. Oh wait...
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The interest rate?
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Yes, but your credit union won't pay Slashdot to have their ad featured as a news story. So tough for them.
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I call BS. I have accounts with three large credit unions, and the best account pays 0.55%.
https://www.patelco.org/Checking-And-Savings/Savings/Money-Market/#MoneyMarket [patelco.org]
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They only pay 1/5 of a percent, except for tiny deposits.
On those tiny deposits, I'm getting paid a lot more interest.
You just proved the GP correct.
GP didn't say how much money was in the account.
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Do you know how I know you're not an engineer?
As the asshole who works in the IT department, do you think I care about your question?
(Hint: Oh, hell no!)
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Which proves you a liar.
Uh, no. I'm getting paid more interest at my credit union than GE Capital/GS Bank for the modest amount I have on deposit. No one asked about the interest rate for the maximum deposit.
Did you forget to hit post as AC before posting a lie so easy to get caught in?
I never ever post as AC.
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Or, are you that bad at math?
Did anyone state how much money was in the account? My statement stands true — for small deposits.
It's somewhat interesting that everyone is looking at the interest rate for the maximum deposit. I've heard about this behavior. Always scrambling to find the best interest rate, lurching from institution to another, and probably spending more effort than it was worth. Must be a sad way to live.
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The irony here is that you are clearly better at math than the ACs that keep attacking you. Only a chump keeps large amounts of money in a bank account; what the AC fails to understand is that anything beyond the 2% Patelco tier ought to be invested in the stock market (returning 7%+) instead. (Thanks for the tip about that credit union, by the way.)
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That's terrible. They only pay 0.25% on $50k and over. GS pays more than four times that much!
For the small amount I have on deposit, I'm getting more interest than GS.
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Hmm... Some other countries pay double interest rate for saving than GS. ;)
By the way, if you are far from retirement and do not need to worry about liquid asset (cash), it would be better off in a long run to invest money than put in a saving account. Just a thought...
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Go take a maths class.
$7,000 (blended APY): 2.00% > 1.05%
QED
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Notice how the liar refuses to name the credit union.
Notice how many ACs didn't bother to ask.
https://www.patelco.org/Checking-And-Savings/Savings/Money-Market/#MoneyMarket [patelco.org]
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That would seem to depend on how much you've got liquid in the bank. If you've got under 2k in the bank, sure, your CU may just be better, ditto under 5k, but anymore and a GS account starts to look more attractive.
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That would seem to depend on how much you've got liquid in the bank.
Precisely. Although I only keep enough in savings to cover several months of expenses at different institutions. I would rather put my money into under-valued, dividend-paying stocks with well-established track records.
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Which is where you enter the territory some will accuse you of being a paid shill... as where only in a narrow band for balance, which is also dependent on resulting deposits and debts is your particular credit union better than the mentioned bank above or other cited credit unions.
For your particular set of conditions, yes, your credit union may be best, and I might claim that (for my particular hair & scalp (a similar condition you only offered after being challenged repeatedly)), my shampoo is best..
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[...] credibility to declare [...]
That's funny. If I wanted creditability, I wouldn't be posting here. Slashdot exists to keep me amuse while I'm waiting for a script to complete at work. Thank you for your participation.
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That shows .2% interest you damn liar.
You're looking at the wrong end of the chart. My statement stands true — for small deposits.
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That shows .2% interest you damn liar.
You're looking at the wrong end of the chart. My statement stands true — for small deposits.
Why would you care about the rate for only a small portion of your account instead of looking at the actual rate?
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Why would you care about the rate for only a small portion of your account instead of looking at the actual rate?
Because that's the actual rate for my small deposit. Everyone else is comparing rates for $50,000+. I'm not even sure if I would keep that much money in one institution.
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Because that's the actual rate for my small deposit.
My bank pays a million percent interest on accounts with zero balances.
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His original comment was valid because pretty much nobody should be keeping large amounts of money in checking or savings accounts (unless they're saving up for a down payment on real estate). Beyond what is necessary for your liquidity needs, everything else should be invested, not merely "saved." The point is that even creimer's 3% return is chump change compared to the 7% (after inflation) average long-term returns from the stock market.
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I keep about 6 months living expenses in a plain-ol savings account (earns %0.8 interest) for accessibility and safety. Sure I could dump that money in with the rest of my investments and risk eating a loss if I need it at the wrong time, but I prefer the peace of mind of knowing I have that money available and can use it worry free if required.
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To present some trivial personal anecdote in a way that could only serve to mislead others?
How did I mislead others? When I posted my comment about interest rates, I was immediately called a liar because I didn't post a link. After I posted a link, I was again called a liar because the interest rate for $50,000+ was significantly less than the Goldman Sachs. The problem is no one specified a dollar amount at the beginning of the thread. For $21,999 or less, my credit union pays more interest (blended APY). Goldman Sachs is a better deal for account with more than $22,000.
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His original comment was valid because pretty much nobody should be keeping large amounts of money in checking or savings accounts (unless they're saving up for a down payment on real estate).
My late father used to keep $50,000 in his checking. That is until Sprint debited $5,000 from checking account for his $50.00 bill. Twice. After that, he kept only $2,000 in checking and kept the rest in a CD ladder. When short-term CDs started paying less than a saving account, he got tired chasing after the rates and dumped everything into a savings account.
Re: So... (Score:5, Informative)
That's why instead of giving creditors your ACH information so they can "pull" payments from your account, you should use your bank's online bill pay feature to "push" the payments. Sometimes that isn't a good option (e.g. when the bill is variable but the creditor refuses to send e-bills, or when they give a discount for signing up for their auto-pay system), but otherwise you should use it.
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I suspect that on average the opportunity cost of leaving your six months of expenses uninvested exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of taking a loss during a poorly-timed emergency. Not to mention, there's no reason you couldn't temper that possible loss by investing in something like a balanced index fund [vanguard.com] (as opposed to a total stock market fund [vanguard.com]).
Besides, for me, six months of expenses would only be $12,000 or so anyway. (I'm on the "live inexpensively so I can retire super early" [mrmoneymustache.com] plan.) Even so, I've opted fo
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That's why instead of giving creditors your ACH information so they can "pull" payments from your account, you should use your bank's online bill pay feature to "push" the payments.
The only two items I have deducted from my checking account is gym membership and rent. Both are in the no choice category. Everything else is deducted from a credit card with 2% cash back.
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I admit it's mostly a psychological thing for me, objectively you're probably 100% right.
That said, I have certainly been considering moving a big chunk (at least half) of it into a low to mid risk index fund (I'm Canadian and lean towards tangerine for that kind of thing).
In general I'm in the Canadian couch potato crowd (primarily relying on index funds and self balanced ETF allocations). I've played with investopedia enough to learn that individual securities trading is probably a terrible idea for me.
An
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Maybe he has a time machine and traveled back to 1980.
When the banks were terribly boring, savings account paid 5.00% interest (give or take), and the wolves of Wall Street were kept far, far away from Main Street.
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Yeah, but this is a real bank so they don't do everything ass backwards.
When the bank comes to you with a paddle, you bend backwards, take a whack in the balls, and ask for another?
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Goldman Sachs offers bank account only to a globally wealthy elite.
Oh, really? With a simple name change from GE Capital Bank to GS Bank, I'm now a member of the globally wealthy elite. Nice! Do I get a brass ring with that?
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He's saying that GS bank is limited to the global elite because most Americans are the global elite. We often talk about the US 1% having obscene amounts of money, but globally-speaking, everyone making more than $35K is the 1% [diygenius.com].
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why anybody would want to let a thief (you do remember 2008, right?) keep their money
If you have evidence of someone at GS actually stealing money, you should take that to the DoJ. But if you're just whining because you don't like the way the 2008 mess played out, and wish that we'd had a more total collapse just so other people could suffer more to make you feel better, then just mutter those things to yourself, instead of pretending you have secret knowledge of actual, specific crimes that thousands of investigators with multiple agencies couldn't spot.
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Not tonight, sweetie. I gotta headache...
Just read the Levin report [senate.gov]... It's only 650 pages.
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Ohhhh, no, never with you... You got what you wanted...
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That would be with Lloyds then.
You get 4% if (and only if) you have between £4000 and £5000 in the account. You get no additional interest for balances above £5000.
Santander 123 gives 3% for balances up to £20000 which is better overall.
However, if you have more than £20000 then good luck in finding somewhere sensible to put it. A quick look shows that the best I can find is 1.45% with RCI Bank (who?!). Better than 1.05% but not dramatically so.
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