Can't see NST holding its share price, page-108

I don't want to give financial advice but in answer to your questions about savings, there is one product that should probably be avoided if possible for first line protection against bank savings going up in smoke and that's not to keep money in mortgage offset accounts. If you carefully read the credit contract that comes with your mortgage you are likely to see conditions in such contracts that refer to negative events that may affect the bank and the relationship between your money and the bank during times of adverse conditions to the bank. These terms basically (in not so plain language) give the bank the right to use money in such accounts and also in other deposit style accounts to meet their own liabilities if required, ie those monies are yours to earn interest during good times but are the banks in the event the bank's assets are not sufficient to meet their liabilities. The bank's reserve ratio is basically the measure of the banks ability to pay its depositors back their money and regulators do stress tests on these banks annually to determine how strong the banks are. Most US banks "passed" those stress test with flying colours but in Sept last year interest rates in overnight markets started to spike to very high levels (>10%) meaning there was resistance in the market between banks to lend to each other, ie the banks started not to trust each other. The official reason for the lack of liquidity was corporate tax payments which is ironic because the mountains of debt the world is printing up to support this bubble is ultimately a claim on the tax payers of the world, you and I. This reason was baloney IMO, the real undisclosed reason is that there is an important financial institution which had solvency issues. The Fed in response started to intervene in this market and up until the recent market meltdown had injected $650 billion in cheap loans just to keep this market solvent and operating (absolutely remarkable but the financial media really didn't give it much coverage). We aren't talking about the long end of the debt market here, ie conventional QE (money printing), we are talking about a basic and fundamental function of the banking system that lets it function from day to day. As pointed out in my other posts the assistance to this same market was increased to $165 billion per day last week in response to the market crashing. That announcement didn't manage to calm the market so the Fed resorted to an unprecedented offer of $1.5 trillion in longer term debt offered over only two days!! The zombie sheeple speculators these banks have trained and created only react to the colour of the index futures tickers and don't ask why, what is the underlying need for so much money?, so as those tickers turn strongly green again the banksters are back in control (temporarily) by back stopping the markets, offering about $2.35 trillion in debt relief printed/counterfeited money since last Sept (with about $1.7 trillion of this offered in the last three days, remarkable).

Sorry I digressed. You are much wiser to move your money from your offset account to your mortgage account because money in your mortgage account can't be accessed by the bank to meet its own liabilities, whereas money in off set accounts and deposit accounts can be taken by the bank to meet liabilities. A bank is simply a business with which you have a contract with even if you even as a depositor, it doesn't guarantee the money you have on deposit. In some countries like Australia the government does guarantee some deposits in certain banks but then it all comes back to the tax payer in the end. In the US the these banks are called Federally insured banks and they are the same banks that are being bailed out as we speak by more money printing. The problem arose when they changed the law in the US allowing investment banks to take control and gamble with people's deposits. In the past before the law was changed and control was handed over to the criminals, bank deposits could only be used for lending for limited reasons, now it's laissez faire, no risk differentiation left in markets, the normal distinction between government debt/bonds and equities has been trashed, the markets, bonds, the banks and everything else is backed by only one thing the printing press, that is our financial system. Actually nowadays it's a button on a computer which creates the money from thin air, just a few electrons creating zero and ones in a computer memory somewhere can materialise $1.7 trillion dollars overnight and people seem happy with this. I'll assess the risks in this system as they relate to me and owning paper in a stock market of any type doesn't seem a safe bet to me. You guys do whatever you like. Esh