Reified and Refined

WSJ - Free Checking in Danger

Yet over the past few months, the middle class has seen a beneficial feature of modern banking—free checking—begin to vanish due to these “reforms” and the substantial loss of bank revenues that they’ve caused.

There are two main culprits in free checking’s demise: the Federal Reserve’s new rules, in effect since July, that restrict banks from charging overdraft fees when customers overdraw their checking accounts; and the amendment from Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) in Dodd-Frank that puts price controls on the interchange fees that merchants pay to banks and credit unions to process debit cards.

The decline of free checking is the first of many middle-class perks likely to vanish in the rush to regulate. As one of its first orders of business next year, the 112th Congress should introduce legislation repealing these policies and title the bill the “Free Checking Restoration Act of 2011.”

Uh, assholes, if overdraft fees were paying for free checking, then it wasn’t exactly free checking, now was it? In effect what has happened is we’ve replaced a punitive and arbitrary (and likely extremely regressive, when you consider who ends up paying the vast majority of overdraft fees) way of paying for checking with an orderly and predictable one. The reason they’re pissed is because it’s a lot harder for them to squeeze those last few pennies out of the working poor under the new rules. Nice business model you got there, fuckers.