THE award for the biggest corporate scrooge on the high street goes to HSBC.
I received a letter this week informing me that as of Christmas Eve, my HSBC overdraft will no longer exist.
On the night before Christmas, the friendly folk at the world's local bank are calling in my last remaining relic of student debt (well almost the last).
Having gradually snapped out of the student mindset that an overdraft is 'free money' (as one drunken friend once told me), I've no bitterness over having to pay it back. But why on Christmas Eve?
Hopefully my bank manager - who is increasingly hard to get hold of and seems intent on hiding behind ranks of call centre staff all over the world - will be visited in the night by three ghosts to force him into a moral rethink.
Perhaps the festive timing is a sign of just how knackered the banks are and we will see more and more institutions calling in bad debts in the New Year.
In the meantime, I apologise in advance to my family and friends who are likely to see a marked slump in the quality of presents under the tree this year.
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