why couldn’t the funds be transferred to other banks or a federal team take up residence in the defunct bank to run it until a sale or transfer can be made? It doesn’t seem like an impossible situation. You can even leave everyone but the executive and management teams in place so the day to day operations would still run smoothly. In fact, without the egos managing things, it may become more efficient.
Your scenario seems to me like one the banksters would promote so that people would fear taking action against them.
[insert “the only way to stop bad guy with a (noun) is to have a good guy (same noun)” joke]
Credit unions?
Locally owned and controlled banks?
Could these potentially suck less (even though they may well traffic with the bad MegaBankCorps at some levels) than doing business directly with the blatantly evil guys?
E.g.:
https://www.newresourcebank.com/
http://www.pcuonline.org/
https://www.icba.org/
Am I kidding myself here?
Is it just better to stuff my futon with cash? Or doubloons?
How far can one withdraw consent from the worst of the worst of the banksters and still conduct a relatively non-Ted-Kaczynski-esque life?
@hello_friends please, if you have any advice here, I’m listening.
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It’s not advice, but I think framing the question and organizing socially has more moral weight than our individual consumer choices.
So participating in a publicized group boycott of a particular entity for a particular bad act legitimizes a different social norm. And vote democratic socialist. It’s slow work.
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Thanks. Agreed. Organizing is key. Participation en masse is key.
Have participated in many a boycott as well, some organized by Austin co-ops and some I only became more aware of thanks to Green America (was Co-op America), which shortened my learning curve quite a bit when I joined in 1992.
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I know a fair bit about credit unions, though I am far from being in any way authoritative on the subject. Take this with the appropriate truckload of salt.
They are a good thing, but in order to gain access for their members to things like charge cards, and indeed to look after their own holdings, they rely on the services of one of those evil banks. In fact, the evil banks like credit unions because they enable the bank to mitigate some of their own risk.
It is not really practical for a credit union to keep its float in a piggy bank under the bed. I used to know a guy in the US who was involved in the start of a credit union and in the early days this was exactly what they did, but eventually the person with the safe in their house got cold feet. And in the UK, all cheques are cleared though certain main banks only.
It has taken the Right thirty years to destroy social democracy in the West. You can only start now, but it will take a long time to rebalance the system.
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Unfortunately, those are the highly qualified people who know banking law, risk management and all the rest of the stuff that makes banks work. I am not an expert on this, but from reading and talking to people the problem is that liquidity - without which no loans - depends very much on inter-bank trust. The money that passes over bank counters is a tiny amount of their exposure, which consists of both long and short term loans. Those loans are constantly coming up for payment or collection and they can be very substantial. The only people who understand them are at the level that you want to get rid of.
Take the example of an army. In 1936 Stalin, in a fit of paranoia, killed or exiled most of the competent senior officers of the Red Army. Result? Germany nearly won the war in 1941. You cannot replace senior officers in five years, especially when you’ve just killed the people needed to train them. Red Army casualties throughout WW2 were very high because of the loss of management skills.
As for “Federal team” - how many bankers do you think there are in the Federal government? The short answer is “not nearly enough”.
I can see that you may just take this as meaning that the arguments of the bankers have got to me. I suggest you might want to read Fools Gold, by Gillian Tett. It will appal you at what goes on in banks but it will also explain why it is so very, very hard to fix the problem. Also read anything financial by Michael Lewis. You may end up still believing I am wrong, but you will be believing it for better informed reasons!
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I’ll just leave this here.
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