@MichaelHomer sorry to hear about your last-minute travel and your coworker's situation! If it helps at all, I enjoy searching Atlas Obscura if I'm going somewhere new. I linked to their page for Memphis.
@FaheemMitha I donno, when I hear about third-world problems, things like lack of access to clean water and basic sanitary systems come to mind... I'm not sure you've achieved third-world problem status as of yet.
Definitely a distressing situation, though. They have any official word yet?
@derobert You must have missed the part where they've offering depositors/account holders Rs 1000 for the next six months. Definitely Third World callousness with a dash of crazy. Modi style.
@derobert Official word from who? I've been following the news. It's a fairly big bank, so it's been getting all sorts of attention.
Boy, there's nothing like being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don't think it's made the international news, though. Too much other (and crazier) stuff going on.
I'm not sure these people realise (or care) that some of these people could literally starve to death. This bank serves a lot of poor people. And a lot of them have all their money in the bank.
@derobert I don't follow the last sentence. But every article on the subject mentions it, usually with the air that they're telling people something they don't know.
Just for context, Rs 1000 is approximately USD 14.
Well, with the name of the bank to search with, appears neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times have written anything about it. Unless they use a different spelling or something.
It is an interesting approach to say "no, this bank totally ins't failed, but they're not allowed to make any transactions over $10 for the next 6 months!" Interesting in the n+1 meaning not printed in the dictionary: "utter BS"
And it's not actually failed. It's issued some bad loans. Which happens all the time in India. Probably in other places too.
And there are other, better ways to handle this without giving several thousand people heart attacks.
Possibly over a hundred thousand people. I haven't found consistent figures for the number of depositors.
Parenthetically, it's disconcerting that both the Managing Director and the administrator RBI has appointed, look, dress, and talk like peons. Let's hear it for dreadfully fractured English.
@FaheemMitha It reads like its "of course it isn't failed, because if its failed we'd have to immediately give you your Rs 1 lakh". Which appears to be about $1400.
What you'd expect to happen (well, elsewhere in the world) is that you'd immediately have access to the insured amount. Then you'd get some portion (probably most, if not all) of the uninsured amount back over the course of the next months to years as the bank was liquidated.
I don't know if they planning to liquidate it. They may just leave it in an undead state for some years, while the depositors wait vainly for their money.
That's a worst case scenario, granted. But in India worst case scenarios seem to happen quite regularly.
@derobert Yes, it is.
There are apparently a few cooperative banks which have been under RBI administration for years. One of those date from 2013.
@derobert It's still under RBI adminstration, or whatever it's called, I believe.
"issued directions", they seem to be calling it.
@derobert It's probably a mix of Indian inefficiency, and trying to get the bank into better shape while not actually closing it. But given that (I think) they haven't let the depositors access to most of their money for most of that time, it's still pretty crazy.
thewire.in/banking/explainer-whats-sparking-panic-at-pmc-bank says "It has 137 branches in six states and as of March 31, 2019, had total deposits of Rs 11,617.34 crore and advances of Rs 8,383.33 crore." .... so that's going to be far more than thousands of people.
The priority should be to get the depositors as much of their money as possible, as fast as possible.
@derobert Over 100k, yes.
That's not so much money in USD. It's a lot of money in India. It's a large bank in its category.
@derobert Oh, and that's actually a fairly good periodical.
Not sure if it's purely an online one.
The funny thing is that I was looking at their annual report and financial just last month. And had a chat with the branch manager, who assured me that my money was safe.
India apparently has weird ways of writing numbers. Which keep sending me to Google to figure out what, e.g., a "crores" is. Very tempting to yell at them at them for that. I mean, you all invented the 0-9 place-value system, please use it!
It is interesting reading all these (English) stories about PMC Bank how much of it is all reporting on the rumor mill. I guess that's not too odd, just what happens when verified facts are absent.
@derobert Yes, that's correct. The RBI is saying nothing. The MD had an interview with a couple of journalists desperately trying to drag some information out of him. I felt for them. They were obviously trying quite hard.
He said a bunch of stuff, but I don't know how much of it to believe.
Note that this is mostly a Maharashtra bank, and many (most?) of the Maharashtra branches are in Bombay. But it does have a presence in other states too.
So it's kind of a local thing. It was started by a Sikh, and still seems to have heavy Sikh involvement. In my innocence, I thought that was a good thing. Also, it has a 80% women staff policy, which didn't seem like a bad thing either. Or it might be less than 80%. But definitely high.
@derobert Quite so. Though even USD 250,00 isn't all that much. Though I suppose you could probably break it up into smaller accounts. With a 1 lakh limit, that isn't really practical.
@FaheemMitha Well, for an individual bank account balance, $250k is a fair bit. And not only can you break it up in different accounts... there are companies that will do it for you for a pretty minimal expense.
It's $250k per ... errr ... bank-relationship. So if you have $250k checking + $250k retirement at the same bank, that's covered (all $500k of it). Two checking accounts at the same bank are still $250k. A joint account counts as a separate relationship though.
But since the US has thousands of banks, many of which you can open an account with online, it's pretty easy to have accounts at as many banks as you need.
Or open up one of the pass-through accounts where the company does that for you (splitting between banks)
@JeffSchaller Thanks! I've only really got one day "off" (/recovering from the mignight arrival), so I'm planning on going to the civil rights museum and then we'll see
