If you have term deposits in a NZ bank watch out!

Yes the “levers are in place” as Minister of Finance announced earlier. In the event of a banking crisis, part of your term deposit could help bail out the bank .

Listen to Radio New Zealand interview by Kathryn Ryan today at http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20121112-0908-banks_making_record_profits-048.mp3. Bernard Hickey says banks ought now to give you a higher interest rate in your term deposit because the Reserve Bank now has in place what is called the Open Bank Resolution. This means that those who hold assets with a bank will be called on to help bail out the bank in a bank crisis. What is so disturbing in this interview is that the size of a banking crisis can be 35% if GDP and an expert being interviewed told us that this figure is common.

Nicole Foss reminded us that Government bonds are much safer. Personally I have moved my term deposits to Government bonds and I know others who have taken Nicole’s advice.

If you don’t want to do this then take Bernard Hickey’s advice. He says that because your term deposit is now at more risk due to the Open Bank Resolution being in place, you should go to your bank and demand a higher interest rate.

All of which reminds me of what Bernard Lietaer has been saying for decades. If banking crises happen that often there must be something systemically wrong with the system itself. Read his website or any of his books, including the Club of Rome book Money and Sustainability, available from Triarchy books.  He lists the number of banking crises, sovereign debt crises and currency crises which have happened round the world in the last ten years. It is horrifying.

He says the on-going financial crisis results not from a cyclical or managerial failure, but from a structural one: more than 96 other major banking crises occurred over the past 20 years, and these crashes have happened under very different regulatory systems and at different stages of economic development.