Oi! Me bank's been nationalized!

Woke up this morning to hear on the radio that Gordon Brown and company decided to take a controlling interest in the Royal Bank of Scotland (owner of NatWest, the British bank that our family uses here). The banking crisis hits home...

I can't say that the banking experience here is all that wonderful, at least compared with how things are in the US. Generally speaking in America you can open a free checking account with nearly any bank as long as you have a pulse and you provide some sort of minimum deposit. Here in the UK we had to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to get the same sort of deal-- most of the banks wanted to charge us steep fees just in order to provide us with a checking account (and apparently this is not just how foreigners are treated-- it's the same deal for the locals). Amy was able to find a better deal with NatWest, but it was puzzling that the "base" level of service here is so much more expensive.