Molly Ivins March 26

"Any idiot can face a crisis: It is this day-to-day living that wears you out." -- Anton Chekhov

AUSTIN — Ever get the feeling that you're being nibbled to death by ducks, economically speaking? Aside from those who have been recently downsized (do they have a box for that yet on the unemployment form?), it's sort of hard to see exactly where the effects of ye olde Stagnant Wages are coming from. It's not like the Oil Crunch, when the cost of filling your tank suddenly doubled, or the Oil Crash, when all us Texans went broke together. It's more like ... well, that fee thing on your bank statement — noticed that lately?

Yep, you're right; it's not your imagination. The banks have found several new ways to rip us off lately." According to the Chicago Tribune, the Federal Reserve says that income from bank fees has risen more than 50 percent since they started tracking it in 1985. In 1994, 34 percent of the banking bidness' profit of $44.7 billion came from fees. Last year, according to The Reuter Business Report, the bankers made $48.8 billion, the fourth straight year of record profits, driven by fee income.

Gone are the days when we used to get nickel-and-dimed to death; now it's a buck here, a few bucks there. My favorite is First Chicago, which instituted a $3 fee for speaking to an actual human teller, even on the phone. Of course, the other banks are following suit. And it's not as though you could save on fees by avoiding actual human tellers, even on the phone; the surcharges for using your automated teller machine card now range from 50 cents to $2.50 per transaction. (One way to foil the bastards is to take out the maximum amount every time you use the machine.)

Proving once more that bankers all have hearts the size of caraway seeds, here's another cute fee: You get a check from a fellow citizen who has failed to make allowance for the additional fees on his account. The check bounces. Not only does the citizen who wrote it get charged as much as $22, plus a $10 account fee for going below the minimum balance at some banks, but you (who have done absolutely nothing wrong) get charged $7 for having put the check (which you had no way of knowing was rubber) into your account. This is called a Deposit Item Returned Fee.

Plus, if the bad check and the new fee cause some of your own checks to bounce, you naturally get socked with the old insufficient funds fee as well. According to the Fee Income Report newsletter, the number of different types of bank fees has risen from 96 to more than 250 since 1990.

Ralph Nader, who should be canonized, wrote Rep.

Jim Leach, chairman of the House Banking Committee: "We have compiled data showing that banks generated almost $2.6 billion in fee revenue from ATM transactions in 1994, while saving more than $2.4 billion in teller costs. The ATM transactions cost banks less than $2.9 billion. Thus the banks enjoyed increased profits of more than $2.1 billion as a result of their customers' use of ATMs."

Janice Shields, research analyst for the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, points out that this means the banks made 81 cents in profit for every $1 spent by consumers at ATMs, and the cost of running ATMs is going down. ATM fraud losses averaged less than $178 per machine in 1993, or $0.002 per transaction.

Yet the banking industry continues to claim it is losing money on ATMs. "Bankers are using a voodoo accounting formula that sets aside their massive savings from ATMs so they can present inflated costs to overcharge consumers with unconscionable fees," says Nader.

Naturally, the greedheads are pushing Congress for the "Financial Regulatory Relief Act" so they can make even more money off ATMs. And you know how much this Congress cares about consumers. The banks want to raise the user's liability rate from $50 to $500 for "substantially contributing to the unauthorized use of the card." Like, by losing it. Under current law, you can only be charged if you provide the means for unauthorized use of the card, like by giving the number to a crook.

The old "regulatory relief act" trick is a banker's Christmas wish list. If you are wondering how an industry that has been making record profits for several years can plead for regulatory relief, you haven't been paying attention to Newt Gingrich's Washington. The only reason that this unholy piece of sludge hasn't already been passed into law by the Newtzis is that the insurance companies doesn't like it because they'll have to pay out more money. Don't you just love it when two titanic special interests lock horns?

The good news is that there are still some banking bargains out there. Your friendly credit union and several smaller banks will still give you good deals on a checking account.

Of course, most of us choose our banks for convenience of location — and even that is going by the board as all these mergers mean the big banks close branches, especially in poorer neighborhoods.

One trouble with all this "magic of the marketplace" bull is that we're all supposed to be informed consumers who have time to spend an afternoon comparing obscure banking fees. In an economy that already forces millions of people to work two or three jobs and not spend enough time with their kids now, who has time to check out how much a "Personal Account Signature Card" (a real beware-of-the-small-print item) is going to cost? Let's face it, if it weren't a slow day, you wouldn't even have time to read an 800-word column about how you're getting ripped off.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.