It's a serious hassle to shut down a bank account and transfer money to a new one, especially with direct deposit, automatic bill payments, and the like.
The same is true of refinancing at a different bank from the one that currently holds your mortgage, or trying to persuade a new bank to give you a business loan.
They know the bank they're trading with may be taking the other side of the trade (in the Abacus deal, for instance, the flipbook said that Goldman might be short the securities).
The result was that IKB, the German bank in this deal, bought $150 million of notes in this C.D.O.
It seems improbable that they will simply vanish (the way a bank like IndyMac did), because the government won't allow it.
It's nearly impossible for consumers to evaluate how healthy a bank is.
Even if people are dissatisfied with their bank, it's usually cheaper not to fight than to switch.
In addition, Nordbanken, the largest bank nationalized in Sweden, was already eighty per cent government-owned.
The FCA said the bank should have placed more importance on this, particularly as it was reviewing its procedures as a result of the Libor fine.
During the hearing, it emerged that neither HMRC, the Treasury or the UK bank regulators appear to have questioned why HSBC's Swiss subsidiary had become a magnet for thousands of rich people across Europe and whether there was any systemic problem in the bank's governance.
