Careful with your bank deposits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPsOopzp7e4

True and scary. This is in the US. It has already happened in Cyprus. Depositors lost up to 60% of their deposits.

What about Singapore? The last time I checked, the Singapore Deposit Insurance Corporation (SDIC) - which was set up in 2006 to insure bank deposits to assure people and make them trust banks - only has about $130 million in the fund. Only $7.4 million are in CURRENT assets, the rest are in NON-current assets (god knows what kind of assets they are).

Hope my numbers are correct. Felt like calling them up and ask if this is a joke, but haven't got about doing it. Come up with your own figure of the number of bank accounts, and divide $130 million by your number and see what result you get.

Free-market economists will say that such government insurance schemes make people less cautious about their banks. This is very true and is one of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. After all, we all do more research on the smart phones that we want to buy, rather than research on the banks that we want to put our deposits in.

Just a few years ago, Singaporeans lost money in the banks' investment funds and it was big news. About 10,000 Singaporeans lost all or a large part of their investments totalling over S$500 million in products linked to Lehman Brothers. Only part of the money lost was compensated.

Note: This is not fear-mongering. It's a good practice be careful with your accounts. It may not hit us but it may hit future generations.