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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing even more cumbersome obstacles associated with banking here in Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Bangkok Bank Cracks Down on Foreigners Accounts amid scam fears. Quoting directly: "Bangkok Bank has adopted stricter requirements for opening new deposit accounts in Thailand for foreign customers..." My first comment on that was how much stricter can you get? It's already pretty darn cumbersome to get a Bank Account in Thailand, especially on a Non-immigrant Visa like a Tourist Visa, to say nothing of converting to Retirement Visa; it's not the easiest thing in the world. And bear in mind, this isn't always driven by law and policy. Sometimes it's internal bank policy that causes this as well. That said, quoting further: ".. affecting tourists and potentially any expats who do not hold long-term visas. Quoting further: "The bank said the tighter conditions align with Thailand's efforts to improve cyber security and combat financial scams." That's just ringing real hollow to me at this point. I mean you now need ID to transfer any money. One of the things I loved about Thailand when I first moved here was you could go to a bank deposit machine, throw whatever, I mean there was a cap on it - I think it was a few hundred thousand baht - but if you needed to transfer 10,000 baht to somebody, you threw it in a cash deposit machine, a CDM machine, you could just punch in their Bank Account information and off it went to that person. Now it's like, I don't know. I don't know how to put it, they just sort of, I guess they just want to track and trace every little thing, and it rings hollow that you couldn't put at least say 50,000 Baht or even 20,000 Baht you can transfer without needing all this ID and knowing every little thing. I fail to really see where the Al Capone of money laundering is going to come out of the shadows and be able to move and shake around for transactions less than 20,000 baht. You could even put a cap on the amount of transactions you could make for even that amount per day and accomplish the same thing, but no, let's make a blanket, we are going to track and trace every single transaction. It's just Orwellian frankly. That said, quoting further: "It said new conditions apply to opening new accounts and applications for credit cards and mobile banking services. The aim is to prevent financial fraud, particularly the use of so-called mule accounts." Again, everyone is not Pablo Escobar okay. You could put a cap and say, "no transfers over 20,000 baht", "no transfers over 30,000", "no transfers over 50,000'. I mean with inflation and things the way that they are, that's not that much money in the grand scheme of things. It looks to me like it's just this brave New World, sort of Orwellian desire to track and trace everything in a desire to tax everybody on every transaction. 

I was watching this guy Martin Armstrong, which I've been sort of panned in comments before for mentioning him, but he has brought up the fact that he has talked to some of these bureaucrats in his travels and in his business as a consultant, and he has said that they think by tracking and tracing everything, they are going to improve or increase tax revenue by 30% or something of this nature. The reality is what they are going to do is just stifle economic activity altogether. People are just going to throw up their hands and say it is just not worth it to go through all - everything is just so inconvenient now, it's just a pain, it's a hassle to do anything. And I get, yeah with the digital apps you can do everything, fine. But then every single thing you do, there's some little nibble that gets taken or some little fee or some little cost. It adds up and it erodes people's net worth; it erodes people's personal wealth. And as a result of that, the wealth effect goes down; people don't think of themselves as more wealthy; they don't necessarily, it's sometimes gets to the point where they say it's not worth the hassle to sell somebody a widget over the internet that costs less than 500 baht if I have got to go through a bunch of paperwork or deal with a bunch of costs and fees and things to just get 500 Baht to sell this thing. My point is where does this stop other than a totalitarian system which really benefits no one?