If you have a billion € in cash, even in the form of a 1 billion € banknote, how do you store it? It has a cost, for obvious security reasons. You cannot put it on a bank account either, because putting money on a bank account is equivalent to having a 0% bond with a non-risk-free bank: you don't own your money, you just lent it to the bank, if it fails, you lose your money.

Having a treasury bond nowadays is the same as having money on a bank account, it's just a line of credit written somewhere, the huge difference is that if the organism recording the line of credit (a broker, for instance) fails, you still own your bund.

Oh, that actually makes sense. It atleast explains why interest can be nagative on bunds. It's money with a back-up copy in e.g. the Central Bank if you lose it.

Why make the fuzz and having bunds in the first place and not just have the Central Bank offer accounts with a card connected? The bund system seems like an arcaic paper thing that made sense 40 years ago.

> Is there a tax on cash or something.

Something. It is far from trivial to store significant amounts of cash. If it gets stolen, lost or destroyed, you basically have lost your money. Also, significant amounts of cash are not that liquid anymore. It takes time to get that from your vault and deposit that to a bank. Cash is just a pain in the ass in many ways.

You don't get it so it it's a scam?

It seems like a scam.

I'm feeling scammed when I'm buying stock with a 30 min delay on pricing and orders becouse I'm not hooked up to the really expansive investor network.

I'm feeling scammed when I can't buy real estate obligations directly but have to indirectly buy it via some expensive fund.

I'm feeling scammed when Master Card charges x.x% of every transaction I do with my bank card and it doesn't even show up on the recipe.

But maybe it's just me. It's not really a scam since I know I'm being scammed, than it's just business I guess.

The answer is that no work in life is free.

Everything you pointed to is a transaction cost (or, equivalently, a limitation to reduce the number of actors to a manageable number). You're paying for the work to make that thing happen.

And, thank god, financial and medical industries are largely precluded from offering free services (a la Google) in exchange for selling every scrap of your data.

Ye, well agree I get that. But the price of the banks services is in no way justified by the value added?

A 2% card fee is 24 minutes off a 40h work week spending half your wage with card. It's like going to the physical bank and withdrawing money saves you time if you are near by anyways (pretending the card fee was added to the recipes as a cost).

If you make 1000 USD a week, that's 10 USD or having 20 letters sent all over the country being delivered by hand every week.

Card purchases are not being manually reviewed by the bank anymore like the old photo copy ones, but we still pay for it.

It's just insane how this arcaic system prevails and how much profit can be squeezed out off it.

I guess with card fee's the main problem is that the consumer is not paying it directly, and the companys don't have the guts to openly put the cost on the consumer.

To me, it sounds like getting fast food and being amazed at how much the french fries and soda are selling for compared to the cost. Businesses don't make equal profits on everything they do, and most businesses have a lot of overhead that isn't directly linked to transactions, but is just the basic necessity to even be in business.

So I think your intuition that the fees aren't linked directly and proportionally to services is correct, but that's true of all businesses and it doesn't mean the profits are unreasonable overall.

Credit cards, at least in the US, rebate up to 2% or so of fees back to some customers, so they aren't charging all that much for their services.

Credit unions and banks that I've dealt with provide basic services like checking for the price of the float on your deposits, which has to be extremely small these days.