“BULLYING” TACTICS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 October 1940, Page 2

“BULLYING” TACTICS

BY LONDON BANKS. NEWSPAPERS INDIGNANT. The London newspapers are indignantly criticising the high-handed manner in which local branch managers of banks are putting pressure on small clients with overdrafts. The managers have been telling these clients to sell their industrial stocks at the present low levels,, “because they will go lower,” and reduce their overdrafts. The City Editor of the “Daily Express" announces that as a result of the newspaper campaign two of the five big banks have instructed their branch managers to slow down efforts to compel repayments and reductions, but that the three others have not yet considered it worth’ while to issue a similar instruction. Some shares, he declares, have been sold at ridiculous levels.

The City Editor of the “Daily Mail" says he is receiving many surprising accusations of bullying tactics by bank branches.

He instances individual cases, and asks if the banks’ attitude is proper, because under the Defence regulations a bank cannot foreclose against a borrower without the Court's permission.

Nearly all the complaints from people with overdrafts that the newspapers publish emphasise that the banks pushed them into buying industrial shares when they were at their highest levels, and are now putting pressure on them to sell out at a heavy loss.