Lower deposit rates might tip the balance for some savers wondering whether to put their money into shares.

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Shashi Verma, TfL's director of customer experience, said: ''Pay as you go Oyster cards do not expire and customers are able to return their cards to a Tube ticket office at any time for a refund of the remaining balance and card deposit.

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The balance will be returned via direct deposit 120 days following return from deployment.

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In all likelihood Britain's banks will be given even more time to expand their deposit bases and shrink the nastiest bits of their balance-sheets, while being weaned very slowly off state guarantees.

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To finance the off-balance-sheet assets, the government set deposit interest rates at very low levels: 1% or so.

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It arranged a deal to buy Wachovia (nyse: WB - news - people ) that would have involved moving troubled assets off the combined company's balance sheet with the assistance of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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Citi should be able to take the losses in its stride, given its enormous balance sheet and low cost of funds (thanks to cheap deposit funding).

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Having a commercial bank would boost Morgan Stanley's efforts to use its balance sheet to attract more investment banking business, bring it a cheap source of deposit gathering and also bring it a fund-processing business.

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Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing for much of the past decade, bank regulators repaired bank balance sheets in part by using government resources to recapitalize the banks and in part by setting deposit rates much lower than lending rates.

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