Money Sense

By Alex Allen

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I never really care much about banks. It's not that I have some kind of innate dislike for them, there's just no real emotion either way, it's a general feeling of 'meh'. I know that it probably makes me sound ill informed and uneducated, but I still don't completely understand how a bank can go from being perfectly fine one day to being minutes away from folding completely the next. Hell, come to think of it, if someone asked me what a bank actually was I wouldn't really even know what to tell them. It sounds stupid, but just think for a second, what is a bank? Whenever I mention my general lack of of understanding of banks, some people take that as me saying I'd like to know more about them. Not true, I wouldn't. Actually I don't care at all, I am one of the many people in this country that has no interest in banking whatsoever and is completely bemused by the Dow Jones, the FTSE 100 and the stock exchange. Whenever it comes on at the end of the news I start thinking about other things, what I'm going to have for dinner, future consumer items I might like to buy, that sort of thing. Banks know this, that's why when it became time for me to choose my current student account, I naturally went for the bank that was offering me the best free stuff. Did I need the brand new Liberty X album and two cinema vouchers? Did I fuck.

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However, even with my basic level of understanding, banks were one of the biggest culprits in causing the current global recession and that horrendous term that will be with us for as long as we live, the credit crunch, so why on earth would they think the public would want their advice on budgeting and handling money of all things? It's ludicrous, it would be like letting Kerry Katona become health minister. And it isn't just because of the irony of where the advice is coming from, it's the patronising, condescending nature of the advice itself, too. 'I see you're going to the gym, why not run down the road instead?' Are Natwest really so out of touch that they think, recession or no recession, that people want to spend their free time in their local Natwest branch being talked down to by a frumpy, thirty-something, cat owning spinster? The only people who are stupid enough to need to be talked through their money by someone as stupid as these moneysense advisers don't even have bank accounts. They keep all their money in a big pile under their mattress and leave their Alsatian at home to guard it. People aren't stupid, they know that if they spend all their money at the pub then they won't have any money left. They've only trained one thousand of these people to lecture people on their money spending, and when you put that in to context of the number of customers they have it really isn't much at all. That's because they know that in practice it's a stupid idea that nobody will ever use. Can you imagine sitting in the middle of the bank on a Saturday morning being told you need to shop around more for your gas and electricity provider in front of other customers like some weird social experiment? It's a massive PR stunt to try and show that despite being partly to blame for it, Natwest really do care about your money worries. Unfortunately, nobody seems to believe them.