The US banking industry has gone to the dogs. The day a non-US bank offers an account that can be accessed over the net will be the day I close my US accounts. Some of the Channel Island banks offer accounts with ATM cards; I think some of them are in Jersey (you don't have to remind people you didn't say _New_ Jersey :-)
I open an account with U.S. $$ in a foreign bank who uses francs ... a month later the franc loses 20 % of it's value as compared to the U.S. dollar.
Happens to me all the time - I deposit my money in a dollar-based account, the dollar takes a dive relative to the Yen, so my account's worth 20% less in new Japanese cars... Most of the banks in major European banking centers and other banking-haven countries will let you have accounts in your choice of major currencies, and a number of the smaller countries have local currencies that keep parity with the US dollar or British pound. That means your account really has X US dollars in it, not X-US-dollars-converted-to-francs-on-deposit, or maybe X Bahamian dollars which are officially worth X US dollars but may be harder to withdraw quickly. There is still some risk that (for example) the Bahamas government may decide to default on its foreign debt by suddenly declaring the Bahamas dollar to no longer match US dollars, but you can only get away with that sort of thing once, so it's a desperation move, the kind of thing you do just before or after the revolution. You're more at risk from small private banks that are offering high rates of interest on foreign deposits because they're ripping off their depositors, e.g. BCCI or Nugan Hand, but that's more risk in the Caribbean than Europe (where the big risk is that they're paying you less interest than you might get in the US, or where the local tax on bank-interest may be higher than your US tax rate.) #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- # Crypto in 3-4 lines of perl --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/