Please, don’t let your bank screw you yet again

Yesterday, I tried to deposit some money with HSBC. They offered me 0.05% interest – basically nothing. Yet HSBC�can lend my money out for around 5% – a hundred times more than they pay me. That’s a pretty good profit for the crooks at HSBC. By deliberately�offering such low interest rates, the high-street banks are almost forcing us to put our savings into risky investments on which they can make massive profits at our expense. At the moment the banks are raking in almost �10bn a year of ordinary people’s money by convincing us to put it into one of the worst “investments” ever sold to gullible savers. These schemes are usually called something reassuring like “Guaranteed Bonds” or “Growth Bonds”. They claim they will give savers something like 120% of stock-market growth over five years. But if the stock market falls, they guarantee to return all your money. I suppose people putting their savings into this “investment” (scam) don’t realise that almost all the benefits from buying shares come from reinvesting the dividends paid by the companies whose shares you hold, not from any growth in the overall market. Yet these�schemes don’t give savers the dividends. In fact, most are based on complex financial derivatives and don’t actually buy any shares.

There is only one certainty with these schemes – savers are going to be awfully disappointed when they see how little they get after their bonds mature. So please, don’t let yourself or anybody you know put any money into these utterly crap savings schemes. They are a rip-off aimed at paying huge commissions to the people who are selling them and will only result in you losing money as inflation will ensure you actually get back less than you put in.