This isn't a question but I think it's relevant here because of the Y2K related issues:

(Kind of long, & there is no link either, sorry )

About two weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Marvin Thornton the Senior Vice President of the Year 2000 Project and today I received a letter back from them via ground mail. This in itself is interesting because I never gave them my home address. They must have tracked it down through my AOL account. Although at first it does seem a bit strange I don't feel paranoid that "they" are watching me. It was impossible to sign a letter by hand like Mr. Thornton did for me, and I appreciate that very much.

The basic jist of my e-mail was that I was planning to close my account if they did not respond to my requests to see the Y2K disclosure reports and statistical test results. Having banked there for over two years I figured that this was the least they could do for me.

SouthTrust did in fact reply to my request most professionaly and promptly. There was a letter adressing my individual concerns and also apologizing for the fact that they were unable to supply me with the *entire request as there is literally a mountain of information gathered. The letter also stated that the info I requested was above the normal and even the auditors were not asking to see the empirical data etc. etc.

They mailed me a very comprhensive summary with references to the audits done by the Internal Audit, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as well as external auditors, Arthur Anderson L.L.P. SouthTrust prided themselves on having the highest possible rankings on each of these department reports. I am fully capable of contacting these agencies and verifying what ST Bank has told me.

So, in short, I will NOT be taking out anymore money then I would in the course of a regular weekend ( re: the weekend of 1/1/00 ). I am most satisfied at their response and I will make sure I recommend their institution to all my friends and customers. I will have my records straight and if some bug wipes out the memory, then I'll have the notarized documents to back myself up with. If it gets to the point where my documents are useless and the world is in chaos then it doesn't matter one iota where my money is, because basically it will be no more than kindling.

Are all the banks in the world going to be in such good shape and get the highest ratings? No, of course not. But I think it's clear that with a little pressure you can get your bank to respond truthfully and promptly regarding the saftey of your accounts. Maybe everyone who is reading this post should follow suit and send a request to their bank and see what you come up with.

In my opinion, it would be folly to take your life savings out of the bank prior to New Years 2000 and liquidate it to other forms of currency. If the banks of the world go down then their is nothing you do about it, and money will be useless, or at least the finanical WAWKI will no loger exist. But if the minor disruptions that are predicted occur and the banks get back on their feet in two-three weeks globaly, then we would have been monumentaly stupid to remove our money before the minor disruptions and create a major catastrophe. We need to have faith in our institutions and leave our money where it has been for years. In the long run , thats the best help we can give to the "endangered" banking institutions. With No money they are dead in the water, with our help they at least have a fighting chance.

Their won't be a disasterous problem with the banks unless people withdraw their life savings weeks or a month before 1/1/00. I cannot speak for the whole of the world but I gaurentee that if there is a recession/depression it's not going to help you any by having your matress lined with 20's , 50's and 100's, plus a few ounces of gold.

Keep your money where it belongs and make sure you get hard copies of account status, bills unpaid and bills paid, debts to loans, etc. etc. When the banks tell you to do this they aren't predicitng a big problem they are just trying to get you to keep your $$$ where it belongs and make sure that you have the necessary information on the outside chance that there will be erasures, errors, and so forth.

(excuse the typos =o)

-- Gerald (SrvivorMP@aol.com), January 29, 1999

Answers

Gerald, More power to you for your efforts and your personal decisions. Like you, I don't plan for the banking system to come apart at the seams, but the tone of your post seems a little unusual to me. Why would you recommend anything to anyone? It sounds as though you're trying to protect some kind of vested interest by making recommendations. Thank you for sharing your experiences, but please refrain from the patronizing commands about such an intensely personal decision as dealing with one's life savings in a time of perceived crisis. If you're trolling, and it seems you are, then congratulations. Maybe if I take the bait it'll save someone else the trouble.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 29, 1999.

If you bank with them then don't they have your address? Where do they send your statements? What's up wid dat?

-- yah (huh?@uh.com), January 29, 1999.

Oh! So you have no idea how they got your address but you bank there. And isn't it interesting that they would provide you with all that info that supposedly they are prohibited from giving out by the Feds.

Scan all correspondence and post here then I'll believe.

LM

-- LM (latemarch@usa.net), January 29, 1999.

Okay Morons,

I gave them my account # and they probably tracked my address down from that. I meant I didn't give it to them in my e-mail. Damn you people are paranoid. You just CAN'T take good news.

-- Gerald (SrvivorMP@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

OK! I apologize. But you did leave out a crucial fact. And you know that this group is paranoid. After all we've been trolled before. I would still like you to post the info that you've got in a more direct form (ie. scanned documents) I have been unable to get anything but happy face "we have it all under control" info out of local banks.

LM

-- LM (latemarch@usa.net), January 29, 1999.

Puddin:

I am trying to get people to protect themselves by NOT taking their money out of the bank. If they take it our and if the banks "fall apart at the seams" then what do you have? A big pile of useless paper. Leave it in the friggin bank where it has been for years. I'm not trolling and I don't have any personal vested interest other than if you all go haywire and remove your money your going to sink the economy thanks to your paranoid delusions.

Where the Hell are Flint and Paul Davis when you need them?

The tone of my post? Yeah I'd call it optimistic. I'll be sure not to post anything so "patronizing" in the future, it obviously upsets you doom and glooming idiots.

-- Gerald (Srvivor@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

Check that... Paul Milne

-- Gerald (Srvivor@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

That's right Gerald, you leave every penny in the bank. Don't you move to touch it, and you encourage all your friends to do the same. That way when I go to take possession of all my property that the bank is holding for me, it will be there. I will get out and I guarantee that in a depression I will make out as fine as possible, while you my friend will probably die, or at least be very uncomfortable.

Remember what ever you do, don't touch your money, don't touch your money, don't touch your money...

-- (Booster@cable.com), January 29, 1999.

No forget that, Paul Milne is a doom and gloomer too...

where the HELL are the rational , sane people?

-- Gerald (SrvivorMP@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

Booster:

Number one I said I was going to take out as much money I would normally need for a weekend.

And Number two if you have hard copies of everything then your safe from error. If hard copies amount to nothing then your sunk anyway, so you might as well keep your dough in the bank (except the $ you spend on preps) and not cause a problem.

Why can't you have a little faith? I'm preparing but I'm not obsessing. Seems to me thats all some of you people can do.

-- Gerald (SrvivorMP@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

The news and documentation that you have seems impressive. I too would like to see it scanned and produced on the site.

-- Puzzled (Puzzled@Gerald.com), January 29, 1999.

I'm going to scan 8 pages of stuff and post it here so that you people can be impressed with the evidence yourself? Well thats a bit much to ask for since you have every oppertunity to do the same thing with your own banks...

But I understand that you people need "proof" of my words so in the spirit of giving I will try and do that later tonight.

Look for posts tomorrow sometime to see if I got it all done and posted.

Your welcome.

-- Gerald (SrvivorMP@aol.com), January 29, 1999.

But notice the effort and dedication you spent to get a reply back from Southtrust Bank - that level of effort is not going to be done by the general public at their "general public" bank.

Also, they did not respond unitl you got "personal" with them by threatening to withdraw funds. What about everybody else who don't have access to this level of reasurrance? Wachovia (a competitor dowe here to Southtrust) has had general little brouchures in its lobbies since early December saying they are/will be ready/are testing, ..... That level is nice, but still is not quantifiable task lists = how many systems, how many are tested, how many are left, what are contingency plans?

Also, this is one bank - who don't have emergency generators either (neither does Wachovia) so what will happen if power is out for 3-4-5-6 days? The bank is still shutdown because htey can't "account" for funds, and can't manage checking accounts without the computers. What about the remaining ????? thousands in the US? How many are as far "behind" the power curve as SouthTrust and Wachovia appear to be ahead of it?

Who will "warn" those clients?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), January 29, 1999.

Sorry, Gerald, I need to work during the day. Where I work, I cannot post anything (though when I get time I can read Yourdon. My company has denied access to GN's site).

I'm not a financier or banker, I'm a firmware engineer. I've read what I can about this, but I'm afraid much of it makes little sense to me, since I lack enough knowledge to frame the context. As far as I've understood (poorly, of course), panic and bank runs would kill the banking system if the government allowed it (in the Depression they declared bank holidays to save the system from runs). Code bugs are still alive in the banking system, but I don't know how virulent they are in the US still.

I'm very very suspicious of the happyface reports from Japanese banks. Even I can tell that they are claiming to have performed the impossible, barring some totally unsupported assumptions (like maybe they've been using compliant software all along, or something like that).

I have absolutely no idea what worldwide, national or regional effect would be caused by simply cutting chunks of the worldwide banking system out because they're functionally inadequate or troublesome. I'd think it would be like amputating an arm -- you'll survive it, but your life will be very different thereafter.

Beyond that, even pristine, bug-free banks cannot tolerate the loss of those to whom they loaned all of my money (if I had any). Bank failures during the Depression weren't from bank runs, they were caused by widescale inability to repay loans. To some degree the liability can be spread around (remember the S&L mess). That liability is underwritten by taxpayers, which is most all of us. Beyond a certain level of economic implosion, the losses simply cannot be covered.

Gerald, SouthTrust might be in great shape, but banks are a barometer of the economy. You just can't have a healthy banking system in an unhealthy economy, although if the banks are technically together, the economy might recover a bit sooner.

My savings are under my mattress. Sorry.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 29, 1999.

Hey Gerald, I thought your post was interesting. I'm not sure how old you are, but after handling money for a few decades I don't have the least bit of interest in anyone telling me how to arrange my business affairs. I don't think anyone else on the forum needs that kind of advice either. Keep on posting facts, just leave off the the business advice.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 29, 1999.

Gerald: Faith ? 1."confidence or trust in a person or thing;" 2. belief which is not based upon proof;". Sorry, I wish I could, but look around...seems like a high risk bet to me. If you are looking to place blame for general lack of trust, I nominate the last 6 U.S. Presidents.

-- curtis schalek (schale1@ibm.net), January 29, 1999.

Sorry, miscounted. last 7 U.S. Presidents.

-- curtis schalek (schale1@ibm.net), January 29, 1999.

They mailed me a very comprhensive summary with references to the audits done by the Internal Audit, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as well as external auditors, Arthur Anderson L.L.P. SouthTrust prided themselves on having the highest possible rankings on each of these department reports. I am fully capable of contacting these agencies and verifying what ST Bank has told me.

If a Senior Vice President at SouthTrust did indeed reveal to you their Y2K rankings by the Federal Reserve and/or the OCC (and I have no reason to believe you're not telling us the truth), he has violated stringent Federal disclosure laws. For this banker (who would certainly know these prohibitions and the severe penalties associated with breaking them) to do so reveals the depth of his fear. The bankers I have worked with recently have exhibited the same fear; a fear of bank runs that they cannot handle or stop.

All in all, maybe this isn't such a positive sign after all, Gerald.

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), January 29, 1999.

You can do what you wish. Quite frankly, what is mine is mine. If I want to hold it and feel my cash against my cheeks, then that is my business. I don't trust banks, never have. They don't do any favors for me and loan my money out to foreign countries with out my permission.

The banks have a real problem here and quite frankly, I don't care if folks want to line up and get what belongs to them. They earned it, they can keep it where ever. But the financial institutions do not have my best interest at heart, so why should I worry if some of them fall?

-- Big Kahuna Himself (Bigkahuna@incense.net), January 29, 1999.

Gerald--you gave your bank your account number and they PROBABLY got your address from it? Brilliant deduction.

-- duh (huh?@uh.com), January 29, 1999.

After looking at SouthTrust Corp's Year 2000 web site, I was not especially impressed - it actually contains far less information than even my bank has. So I thought I'd take a peak at SouthTrust Corp's most recent SEC 10-Q filing (Nov 11, 1998)...

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/92081/0000950144-98-0126 46.txt

If you will examine it, you will see no mention of "Year 2000" at all. This has me curious. Why do we not see "Year 2000 Project" section in this 10-Q? I assume that SouthTrust has complied with all relevant regulation with regard to their SEC 10-Q filing so why no mention? Are they not required, for some reason, to include Y2K project status information?

While it's true that these 10-Q are of limited value, I was at least able to learn that my own bank has budgeted $20 million towards Y2K and has spent $12 million thus far.

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), January 29, 1999.

And anyhow, why would you Email your bank, requesting absolute scads of information, and not provide your name and address? Just being coy? Like to keep 'em guessing? Puh-leez...

-- duh (huh?@uh.com), January 29, 1999.

Gerald, You are an abysmally incompetent moron. I don't mince words. It is a wonder you can get a fork to your own mouth and stuff food in your pie-hole.

Individual compliance of any bank is absolutely moot. A point that I am sure is wasted on you. But you will find out soon enough like all the rest of the morons.

It is a banking SYSTEM knucklehead. It is not your bank's compliance that will determine if you can access your money. Will your bank's compliance render compliant its vendors, its electrical supply, its water supply, its other customers. Will your bank's compliance prevent panickers from making a run? No. No to all the above.

I really have reached the point where I just have to laugh in the face of sub-moronic cretins like you and your specious rationalizations.

You DESERVE the results of your laughable folly. You richly deserve it.

-- Paul Milne (fedinfo@halifax.com), January 29, 1999.

I , too, read that the banks were not to disclose that sort of information to their customers....you wouldn't be taking the long way around to try to calm the sheeples, now, would you? The scanned, posted articles we have requested would help to prove you are not trolling over here.

As a little boy, my husband remembers the day his father went to the bank to see about his money....it was closed....they lost everything. That was the Depression. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."

-- Mary (blufrogg@garlic.com), January 30, 1999.

Paul Milne,

you my man are so fucking laughable in your own right it's disgusting.

I posted good news my incoherent freind. Whetever the fuck your silly assed comments about my mental state meant the only thing I deduced from them is that every time someone points out the light at the end of the tunnel, your there to shout that it's a train.

To HELL with all you asshole doom and gloomers. Your the real problem here and when I gave advice to keep your money where it belongs it was SOUND fucking advice, not Bullshit. Your going to creat havok in the banking SYSTEM, ( MILNE you fucking prick ) and there won't be any Y2K remediations for the likes of you delusionsal IDIOTS.

Not one fucking shred of proof has fallen into your lap and yet you all have a pretty good idea of whats going to happen. ESP? I really fucking doubt it. Just opinons and extrapolations from so-called experts. The same kinds of people who say the bumblebee cannot fly, theoretically. More like fear seeping it's way into your fragile eggshell minds. Go ahead, live out the rest of the year acting like the world is going to end. Maybe if you get enough people "aware" then you can actually make your silly fantasy come true.

You take every piece of news and slice it into microscopic molecules and analyse the shit out of every tidbit you come across so that you might have the "big picture". Well you know what you pusilanimous pretend freinds of America? Your fucking wrong and all your doing by spreading this bullshit around more is creating a bigger stink. I can see it now, on New Years you'll al be huddled around in your survival communities discussing how wonderful it would be to backtrack into the fucking Dark Ages and reinvent the wheel.

Guess what toadies... your dreams of Y2K salvation fall under the category of paranoid schizophrenic delusionals. Some of your aren't as bad as others, but your God, Paul the insulting gutless wonder Milne is going to be the torch bearer for a new age of "togetherness" and "adaptability". And I bet it won't take much a provocation to get you nuts out there will your guns and your fucking peace symbols, whichever side of the psychiatric coin you land on, and march on Washington to tear down whats taken centuries to build so you can fufill your delusional prophecies of self granduer.

Oh boy I could go on and on. But intead I'm going to start taking COBOL classes tomorrow and start to become part of the solution and not part of the problem. You bunch of friggin crazy assed sons of a bitches can do the world a favor and ship yourselves off to some deserted island where you can live out the rest of your days acting out the final scenes from the movie " The Lord of the Flies".

Milne, and the rest of you bible toting, apocolyptic spewing D&G er's, you can take this post and shove it where ther sun don't shine. Sure there are problems associated with Y2K. Go look in the mirror and you'll see the source of infection. If anyone of you could see how important it is to help solve the problem now then you'd put down your grain mills and your water purifacation tabs and do somthing. But you don't want to do something do you?? You WANT to see the Y2K BS happen, and your all too eager to crucify anyone who says differently. You can now go to the front of the line to collect your pitchforks, balck and white suits and hats with belt buckles and march right the fuck back to Middle England you puritanical pontificating ASSHOLES!!!

Go the fuck home and stay there, some of us have work to do.

See Paul, I don't mince words either. And I'll be all too happy to put a slug in your kneecap so that you can live out the rest of your days homebound and afraid... but I guess you already have the market on that, you don't need my help.

PS:

I'm not going to scan shit for you bozos. Do the fucking homework yourself. You propose to know the will of God. You look at headlines and convince yourself that there are ghosts in the machines ready to strike out and strangle us "dependent" sinners. What a sad case of mass hysteria. I can onyl cringe at the kind of fear your going to try and create in the next eleven months. May God have mercy on all of us. Especially you Milne.

-- Gerald (Srvivor@aol.com), January 30, 1999.

Now I know what a terrified pornographic Rumpelstiltskin sounds like!

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), January 30, 1999.

Your bank may be compliant but it will interface with any and every other bank and financial entity world-wide. It will be open to the problem of imported data from a gazillion sources.

My money will be totally out of the banking system soon.

Andy

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 30, 1999.

Arnie,

>http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/92081/0000950144-98-0126 46.txt

>If you will examine it, you will see no mention of "Year 2000" at all.

What are you talking about, Arnie? How far down did you read? The Year 2000 stuff starts on page 18, slightly past the middle of the document.

>This has me curious. Why do we not see "Year 2000 Project" section in this 10-Q?

The section title is "YEAR 2000". It's on pages 18 and 19.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), January 30, 1999.

Damm it Paul, see what you did now. You made Gerald mad, now he won't show us his little secret documents.

-- Dickhead (nnnnnnn@sss.com), January 30, 1999.

Bank runs won't bring the system "down". The FED will shut the banks down and/or limit withdrawals long before that point.

If that happens, confidence won't exactly be brimming, but the whole shebang is a house of cards anyway. If not Y2k, it will be something else. Bad code, if there's enough of it, is what will toss in the monkey wrench.

How much bad code? If it's a lot, they won't tell us. In fact, it appears that they legally CAN'T tell us. If it's trivial, wouldn't they would tell us? Why would there be any prohibition against that? So, one is led to draw one's own conclusions.

Tell us, who's at fault here for being forced to hedge their bets? The CUSTOMERS, having to act within an information vacuum, or the BANKS, playing cloak and dagger with data we need in order NOT to panic?

Are we supposed to just roll over and take their assurances at face value? I don't know about you, but for me, in terms of credulity, the Federal Reserve and the banking system rate about 1 on a scale of 10. They'll lie to us to keep their game afloat, even if they KNOW it's going down.

We're in a hell of a position. We're ALL in a hell of a position. What is the hierarchy of your responsibilities? Family, neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, world? Banking shows up around "city" - maybe.

This is the banking system we've built. The reserve levels are laughably - no, insanely - low. Every genius in management was breaking his arm patting his own back for laying off all the middle-aged systems people that knew the code. They've flooded the world with huge, taxpayer-backed, cross-border derivatives. Theyve constructed a large, leveraged pyramid of "confidence", without the slighest thought to the possible downside, even in light of the not-too-distant experiences of The Great Depression.

It is difficult to definitively make the case that people are acting irresponsibly if they choose to remove their assets from the banking system? The average person is (or soon will be) forced to make decisions that they would just as soon rather not. However, we've set up such a massive, almighty dollar, instant-gratification culture that the mere thought of being without dollars becomes terrifying.

People will very likely react according to their "conditioning". In terms of potential bank runs, I'm just not sure that rational thought is even a major part of the equation. Depending on how this all unfolds, it would take powerful, believable arguments against self-preservation to mitigate any ill effects to the banking system.

-- Nathan (nospam@all.com), January 30, 1999.

Nathan, you make a strong argument. What profession are you in?

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 30, 1999.

Nathan makes good points, but I may need a little clarification on some of them.

First, the banks are currently prohibited from divulging the actual results of government audits. They are permitted to say that they have been audited, and they are in fact encouraged to communicate their progress and readiness. So far, US banks have been telling us that they're in great shape, relatively speaking, and anticipate no significant difficulties blah blah blah...

The prohibition against divulging actual audit results nominally lies in progress differentials -- the government fears that banks with good results will use these results to solicit accounts from other banks with less glowing results or which have yet to be audited.

Also, we know that no bank can possibly be completely remediated, since that requires systemwide testing which has not yet been performed. Since Greenspan says 99% isn't close enough, and no bank can have reached 99% without this testing, serious concerns remain justified, and of course banks fear these concerns.

Bottom line: No matter how well a bank is actually doing, we cannot afford to trust anything they say. This renders *any* effective communication about progress impossible.

Second, the fractional reserve system's vulnerabilities are in no way economically unique. No economic sector can tolerate an extremely sudden change in public behavior with respect to that sector. As an example, if people overnight developed a fear of cars and all started walking tomorrow, our economy would enter a state of shock. If use of cars declines gradually over a generation (say as fuel sources dwindle and prices of vehicles rises), we can tolerate this slow change. Similarly if we all decided to become vegetarians tomorrow, or if we all decided to have monthly medical checkups.

This is the crux of the difference between Gary North and Harry Browne. Browne's faith is in the invisible hand and market mechanisms, and North claims y2k problems will be much too rapid for the economy to adapt.

The fractional reserve system isn't so much vulnerable to withdrawals even on a large scale, as it is to large, rapid withdrawals. We can only adapt gracefully to change if it isn't too rapid.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 30, 1999.

IMO, Gerald's specific unfamiliarity with the English language has exposed himself as Y2K My Ass.

-- Brooks (brooksbie@hotmail.com), January 30, 1999.

Puddintame,

I write software.

Flint,

I don't buy the 'reasons' for the bank hush-hush. If the FED fears one bank will play itself against another because of audit results, then the FED should say to the banks (as it almost certainly has the power to do), "don't use your audit results to steal another bank's customers". Wouldn't it be far preferable for customers in a given area to either stay in their bank or switch to another bank in their area if that bank looks to be taking care of business? Wouldn't that be more logical than forcing us into decisions to remove our assets entirely? I think so. Therefore, the reasons we ARE being given are highly suspect. I am left only to conclude we're not being told the truth, whatever it is.

And yes, the banking system has understandably legitimate fears about their predicament that people will lose confidence in their services. However, their customers didn't create their predicament. Strangely enough, it would appear that their customers ARE their predicament. So logically, and in their estimation, they conclude they MUST lie to us, and will do so without any compunction whatsoever.

To illustrate this, here's a possible, very simple Y2k decision tree for the banks:

1) Have technical/project problem with Y2k?
No, go to 2)
Yes, go to 3)

2) Have fears that customers may have Y2k fears?
No, go to 3)
Yes, go to 3)

3) If anyone asks, say everything is A-OK; otherwise, don't say anything at all

You see, we won't be able to tell if they're telling us the truth or not, for we will get the same basic pronouncement either way. And inasmuch as we appear to be living in the age of perpetual "lie your hinder off", one can nearly conclude that the truth is that we're being lied to.

So what's a rational person to do? They've actually made it difficult for a rational person to act in a responsible manner. On the one hand, we don't want to crash the system, but by not telling us what we need to know, we may be forced to crash the system. Likewise, on the one hand, we need to be able to financially provide for our dependents, but if they've led us down the garden and the system actually goes down in a big way, we've jeopardized our dependents.

Are these dilemmae by design? Confuse the issue to the point that, in lieu of doing the wrong thing, no one does anything? Maybe, but it's probably attributing the powers that be with more cunning than they command. I think they're just lying because that's what they do or that's what think they need to do.

Your point about Browne vs. North is well taken. The hand of the market does usually produce some sort of reasonable, adaptive solution, the time-scale of which is dependent upon the nature of the particular system undergoing change.

This is the whole issues with Y2k, isn't it? One would have thought that the code would have already been fixed, five years ago. Short of that, one would have thought, as a safety measure, that the reserve levels of the banking system would have been tripled or quadrupled gradually over the past several years. But no, in an outright, capitalistic, bottom line, quarterly results is all that matters culture, none of these things occurred because they would have eaten into profits.

So, here we are, left with contemplating whether we should pull assets from a latently-remediated and/or unremediated (we can't tell which), over-leveraged (this we know), fractional reserve banking system, or not...

-- Nathan (nospam@all.com), January 31, 1999.

Nathan, I think we're on almost the same wavelength here. I'm not saying the banks are lying, I'm saying that we *must* assume they're lying. They have every reason to lie, as you point out. Those banks who believe they're as complete as they can possibly be, have been audited and found to have no problems, etc. are saying the same things as those who are way behind. We can't tell the difference.

There is some justification to the nominal reason for keeping government audit results a secret -- massive bank-switching by the public and private industry is itself disruptive to the system.

But I think the *real* reason is, no bank can be sure yet, because the system testing hasn't been done. There is a very real danger that people can kill the banking system due to concerns raised by these audits today. A lot can be accomplished in a year when your life depends on it.

I'm not sure how I would react to a report that says like "Banks are sure to have problems, but these are most likely to be minor, temporary, and happen to somebody else! There's only a 20% chance that the banking system will collapse from bad code, so please pretend nothing is wrong. You may be better off that way."

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 31, 1999.

Yeah I got that smarmy happy-face brochure from my bank, too. Chunked it in the trash. Not only is my dough not going to be in any friggin bank, but my Roth IRA is about to be yanked out, too. I'll give Uncle Sam (that prostitute) his 20%, but I want the rest. Doubt the IRS will be around next April for me to report this to them, anyway!

Kellie

-- Kellie (bill_n_kellie91@hotmail.com), February 02, 1999.

I find it very interesting that you feel our money 'belongs' in a bank. If it's mine, doesn't it belong wherever I feel like keeping it???

Also, our bank told me last summer that they had finished remediation and were testing. Well it could be true, if it is then they had some SNAFUs, because our church had planned to make electronic donations available to members as of Jan 1,1999, but was unable to because our church computer is compliant, the bank is not. They now are hoping for the end of March... Since we have only in and out at the bank (mortgage, bills, etc), I'm not planning on closing our accounts, but I'm not letting them enlarge beyond what we need to pay current bills, either.

-- Tricia hte Cancuck (jayles@telusplanet.net), February 02, 1999.