Screwing Britain’s savers – our banks’ favourite hobby

Hooray! Yippeee! Yabbadabbadoooo! We’re all going to be rich!

Just two days ago, on Tuesday 1 July, George Osborne’s new ISAs (now called NISAs) were launched. Now the Government allows us to save up to a wonderful £15,000 a year from our already heavily-taxed income into a NISA. So what’s the advantage for us? Well, we won’t have to pay any tax on the ‘massive’ amounts of interest cash NISAs will earn nor on the huge possible gains stocks and shares NISAs could achieve.

Most of the newspapers have been running stories about this fabulous opportunity with supposed ‘experts’ wittering on about how we can all become ‘NISA millionaires’. Billions of pounds of ordinary taxpayers’ money will now pour into these NISAs.

So how have our banks reacted to all this cash heading their way? Well, in a free competitive market, they’d be hiking up interest rates on NISAs in order to attract our money. But in a market tightly controlled by a small, self-serving, parasitic cartel they’d push down interest rates in order to exploit savers.

The cheerleaders for the banks, our highly-paid personal finance journalists, are all telling us that interest rates on NISAs are going up. And this is true. Since December 2013, ISA/NISA interest rates have nudged up ever so slightly. But as this revealing chart shows, they are still around half the level they were at just two years ago even though the Bank of England has held its interest rate steady for the last five years (click to see more clearly)

Yup, the banking cartel have been continually lowering interest rates in order to increase their own profit margins and then have infintessimally increased them over the last few months to make it look like they’re in a competitive market and not a rent-seeking cartel. And, of course, our tame personal finance journalists bleat on about ‘rising NISA interest rates’ to con us into handing over our money.

Of course, not all the NISA billions will flow into cash NISAs. A goodly amount will go into stocks and shares NISAs. But if you read the serious financial press, not the tabloids, most market watchers believe that world stock markets are at unsustainable highs and what they politely call a ‘correction’ is coming. A ‘correction’ can be a fall of anywhere between 10% to 20%. So, you’ve got much bigger cojones than I have if you put any money into UK or US shares at current levels.

I fear the launch of the new ISAs (NISAs) is going to end in a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst naïve savers while our banks and unit trust managers become ever richer at our expense.

(Just a reminder, the ebook version of my book GREED UNLIMITED is available for just 2 more days at the special promotional price of £1.99 http://www.amazon.co.uk/GREED-UNLIMITED-Cameron-protect-squeezing-ebook/dp/B009EWPYT2/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1404376329&sr=1-1 You can read this on your computer, Kindle or tablet)