It is better said in Tagalog, “Ginigisa tayo sa sariling nating mantika.” That is what the oligarchs are doing to us. They own the big banks which are making the economy run. Where are they getting the money to lend to businesses or to the people and from which they make more money? They are getting it from us, the hapless ordinary citizens.
How? One big way they do it is by requiring a big maintaining balance for a savings account. Many of the banks require a P10,000.00. Otherwise, you will suffer a penalty, say P300.00, which they will deduct from whatever amount is there in the account. Usually, this is reckoned at the end of the month. If at month’s end your balance is less than P10,000, then the penalty is imposed.
So if a bank has a 1,000 depositors maintaining a balance of P10,000, the bank has P10 million at its disposal at the end of each month. And big banks don’t just have that small number of depositors. They count them by tens of millions. So they have billions of pesos as capital from the people, interest free. Whereas, we the ordinary citizens have to borrow and have to pay through our noses big interests for our rolling capital, the big banks (owned by owners of the big businesses in this country) have free huge capital from their depositors, us, the ordinary people.
Thus, it should be a welcome relief if the banks are made to lower their minimum balance requirements to P100.00. There is a recent request of the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for the banks to offer accounts with such a minimal maintaining balance. Why only now? And it is just a request. It is not mandatory. In other words, the BSP is also in conspiracy with the banks. It should make it an order to be followed, or else.
Another way the banks are making money from us is the charging of a fee for automatic teller transactions (ATM) where a depositor withdraws from the machine of another bank. It used to be more than P10.00 per transaction. How many transactions are done in a day? Millions.
Then there are the inter branch transactions of the same bank. For instance, if you deposit an amount in Baguio City for a Manila account in the same bank, they would usually charge you around P50.00. Since everything now is computerized, the bank really does not have to exert any effort—just the punching of a few computer keys in a keyboard— to undertake the transaction. Yet they collect P50.00 from us.
There are so many other ways the banks are skinning us. So the oligarchs, the super big businessmen, are getting richer while we are getting poorer.
What we need is for PDu30 to say, “Stop it!” Just like the way he told tycoon Lucio Tan to pay his P7 billion airport arrears—who sheepishly paid P6 billion in a few weeks as a compromise.**