We Don't Want Yer Money!

My wife, Elizabeth Cunningham, is trying to sell books (The Passion of Mary Magdalen etc.) and her CD (MaevenSong) across borders as well as nationally. But her local bank, Rhinebeck Savings, can't even handle a Canadian postal money-order in US dollars ! Canada is only 5-hours drive from there.

We go to Canada often, both on business and to visit our daughter. Have you tried to change Canadian Dollars into US in this country? In Canada, you can change either way at the border, and in many banks; in the US, I found one gas station, where they took Canadian, because they had enough Canadian customers from 5 miles across the border. But no banks will change Canadian (Pound Sterling, Euros, whatever), unless you go to a major city, and often only if they have a foreign currency department.

Guess we don't want their money. We spend enough abroad; you'd think we'd welcome imports of foreign cash: foreigners buying American, even if only $l2 dollars at a time.

Ever have trouble changing dollars abroad? I haven't, except 40 years ago in India, when I had to make a special arrangement between an American bank in Delhi and Bank of India in the small city where I was doing research. Back then, BoI still used huge leather ledgers to record each transaction; each had to be cosigned by the clerk, his manager, and the bank president--carried from one to the other by the "peon." It feels as if American banks haven't progressed much further, despite all their computerization.

Other countries want to receive foreign currency; from selling their goods, or services, to a foreign country, bringing in foreign reserves. It seems as if American banks do their level best to discourage money from coming in--unless a huge corporation, like Amazon, controls it.

We are also the surliest nation when it comes to foreign tourists crossing our borders. Everyone from abroad is suspect.

No wonder we have such huge trade deficits! Other countries support exporters, their banks bend over backwards to welcome foreign exchange and tourists; US banks do their best to discourage transactions such as charging $50 for routing a $12 money-order back to Canada to an American bank, then back. Why $50? Why only American banks?

My wife had to forego payments from Canada. At very least it would have been money entering this country: she tore up the money-order in front of the incompetent bankers.

Why are they like this? Imperial hubris makes Americans hidebound: only American banks can transfer dollars? It will turn us into dinosaurs. Or a poor, Third World country.