that's right america calls them bills as in bill the builder pays his bills with bills hello i'm lawrence and i'm on a quest to uncover all of the memos that britain and america lost in the pond and one of those memos pertains to words specifically words to do with banking and no that is not cockney rhyming slang when you've lived extensively in both britain and america there's a good chance that you've dealt with banking institutions on either side of the pond sometimes you even have to navigate both at the same time like for instance when i had to go to a western union here in chicago to bail uncle toby out of grimsby prison for the fourth time but as somebody who wasn't always such a financially savvy person moving to the us was complicated and it was made even more complicated by the fact that i had to navigate my new bank while learning an entirely new set of words so that the people running the banks don't think i'm an idiot i am an idiot but we don't need them to know that here are seven british versus american banking words perhaps the first thing that i noticed after opening my first u.s bank account is that a transactional account that is an account where my earnings would be sent to once i was eligible to work had an entirely different name to what we used in britain you see in britain this is usually known as a current account and that's not because we use fruit as currency anymore it's called current account because i don't actually know why it's called current account because goods and services are generally consumed in the current period whereas in the united states such an account is called a checking account because again i don't know why let's have a look they're called checking accounts because traditionally they offer you the ability to write paper checks there's a reason i was confused by that but we'll get on to that in a bit before then here's this america loves the word bell weather in politics you might have a bellwether state whose election results might be a reasonable forecast of the national outcome and in banking terminology it turns out there's such a term as bellwether stock and bellwether stock is a type of stock that can forecast the direction of sort of any sector industry or financial market so an example of this in the united states would be jp morgan chase but in britain and i only learned this after leaving because you know i'm not a financial expert bell stock is known similarly as barometer stock and so the funny thing is a barometer is used to forecast the weather do you see the metaphor there and that makes it consistent with newspaper headlines that refer to recessions as the incoming storm it's just it's beautiful symmetry and i love it and that's not to say that i understand what's going on in the financial world as a matter of fact i'm quite clueless thank goodness then for these guys this video is sponsored by truebill truebill is an all-in-one personal finance platform that helps you save more and spend less the personal finance manager allows you to manage subscriptions lower bills monitor your credit score and build your savings all in one place you know at the start of a new year i always like
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN guys this video is sponsored by truebill truebill is an all-in-one personal finance platform that helps you save more and spend less the personal finance manager allows you to manage subscriptions lower bills monitor your credit score and build your savings all in one place you know at the start of a new year i always like END_SPONSOR_TOKEN