Power checking accounts had another interesting feature in former Yugoslavia: country had a huge inflation rate in 1989 (250-400% a month!), so the interest rates were accordingly high. Let's say you deposit 1 million dinars today and in a month you'd have 2.5 million dinars. BUT the 1 million dinars at the beginning of the month was worth like a $ 1000 and 2.5 million dinars at the end of the month was only $ 800. Logically if you earned any high sum of dinars you were basically rushing to buy stable foreign currency A.S.A.P. While you were looking for a willing seller who would not charge you outrageous premium, you kept your money on power checking accounts, because that way you were loosing less money each day. You paid everything by checks. Checks wonderfully took forever to clear. The 33 days might be surprising for the U.S., but that was a standard in Yugoslavia. More marvelously: your checking account was debited the day your bank got the check, NOT the day you wrote the check. Which meant that you could go shopping today and spend 2 million dinars in checks, and they'd clear in 15-45 (90 if you're really lucky, or if you bribed the store manager with some Deutschmarks) days leaving all that time your already spent money to earn interest. More advanced use of the system: you could deposit 2 million dinars on your account, take checks and travel to another city (in another republic preferably), find a branch of a bank headquartered in a third republic and cash your checks there (I usually cashed checks in a Bosnian bank in Slovenia, while keeping my account in Croatia), take the cash and deposit it to your account in your bank in your city. The record of your deposit would precede the record of your withdrawal for about 15-30 days: time needed for checks to travel from Slovenia to Bosnia and then to Croatia. In a month of doing so you could amass enormous amounts of 'virtual money' that would earn real interest on your account. I had a friend who bought a car on interest earned on money she did not have. I was more modest by just buying a TV set. The downside of the power checking accounts were that you were charged a huge negative interest if you happened to fall bellow zero on your account (but that rarely happened to anyone careful).

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