A commentator on Bloomberg TV recently made the statement that banks are not there to help people make money, but to help themselves and their shareholders to make money. At last, some honesty! This may seem obvious in these hard times, but I remember a time when things were different. Once upon a time, you could rely on a bank to be your friend. Or was that just a fairytale?

There was a time when a bank was

1) somewhere safe to keep your money, where it would not only earn sensible interest but was accessible as and when you needed it

2) somewhere you could go to get a start up loan for a business with reasonable "shared risk"

3) somewhere you could go to get an easy to calculate repayment mortgage without hidden insurance extras

Now it seems, like any other product, you must choose carefully, because behind the friendly face, there is a big bad wolf just waiting to make money out of you. What does that mean? It means in effect that the average punter is fair game for a quick buck, and there are bank marketing teams everywhere dreaming up new ways of taking money off you. They seek to charge you for overdrafts, authorised and unauthorised, for letters telling you about your overdraft, for visits to your bank to talk about your overdraft. They will also charge you for giving them your money (as in bank transfer charges) and for hanging on to it (account charges)! Now who dreamt that up as a viable business product? What a genius! You can imagine the boardroom discussion:

"Let´s charge people for giving us their money!"

"Come off it, who´s going to swallow that?"

We did, and we still do. Now if they can charge us for that, imagine what they charge us for loans, overdue payments, management fees, etc, etc. Most people do not even know how much they pay or what the charges are for.

Now all this would be fine and dandy, except that somehow they managed to lose all our money. These places, once safe havens for our cash, suddenly lost every penny we ever gave them. Not very clever! A lot of the money went on directors´ bonuses so they could buy luxury yachts and live in villas abroad. Okay, they work hard looking after our money, so why not? Perhaps we can overlook the fact that they lost all our money that one time. But then what do we hear? All the money that went missing - guess who has to pay it back? We do, the honest tax payer, we have to give them back our money they lost in the first place! So not only have they lost our money once, we now have to give them another load to stop them from having to cancel their trips to Mauritius next year. This fairy tale has turned out bad.

Does any of this make you think? When I was a kid I used to keep my money in a piggy bank. Now it´s in a bank run by greedy piggies.