I'm lucky to be able to reside in four countries: China, Singapore, Australia, and Canada. China is my home country. I left it when I was in my late 20's. I only knew deposits at that time. And I did not have a sense to different interest rates. In 1996 one year bank deposit could bear a double-digit interest rate. That was a hype-inflation period. My savings was mostly in 1 year term deposit, and renewed year after year, since I did not know other options.
I am amazed to read my old blog posts of 2005 and 2006. I know that my financial knowledge was much expanded during that time. I was hunting for higher saving interest rate, I got used to online banking accounts (only operated via internet or telephone), I opened a foreign exchange broker account, and I did online stock trading as well. The most distinguished feature of Singapore financial market is that, the government controls inflation through currency exchange rate, not common "overnight interest rate".
Australia is a special market too. At present, all major developed countries have a super low interest rates environment. But the Aussie overnight interest rate is 4.75% (Japan 0.1%, US 0.25%, Canada 1%, Euro 1%). This is really a question to me. How does Aussie dollar to run under so high rate?
After coming to Canada, I'm surprised to find so many small "banks". Not only to mention "ING Direct" and many many credit unions, I find that there are a lot of corporations, whose core business is others, are offering banking deposits, i.e. Ally, Canadian Tire Bank, etc. The only common thing among them is that they participate in a deposit insurance. This situation will definitely not happen in China where creditibility is much hard to gain.
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