tagged w/ community banks
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"The mission of Move Your Money is to encourage individuals and institutions to take their money out of Too Big To Fail banks and invest in community banks and credit unions.
What began as a conversation among friends over a dinner before Christmas has rapidly turned into a national grassroots movement. So far it’s generated hundreds of stories, millions of website visits, and thousands of individual actions.
Small banks and credit unions have experienced a surge in activity as a result."
One more excerpt:
"Not only do Wall Street banks neglect communities by shipping money to overseas corporations and foreclosing on needy families, but they are also major financiers of payday lending services, which charge usurious rates and abuse struggling communities. A new report by National People’s Action and the Public Accountability Initiative shows how the big banks are enabling payday lenders and profiting from poverty. The Washington Independent reports:
'While small businesses and individuals have struggled to get affordable loans in the wake of the taxpayer bailouts, payday lenders have received new and amended credit agreements from Wall Street,” [the report] says. “Instead of wading further into the business of predatory payday lending, big banks need to stop financing these lenders and instead lend to businesses and individuals that create wealth, rather than destroy it.'
The report shows that big banks are providing billions of dollars in loans to fringe financial outfits; in turn, those fringe financial outfits are offering billions of dollars in loans to customers, often at usurious rates. Some payday lenders, for instance, offer short-term, roll-over cash advances with APRs of over 480 percent.
The report argues the voluminous Wall Street financing means the payday business will keep expanding through the recession, as cash-strapped customers seek unconventional and sometimes dangerous banking products."
More info on how to move your money and finding a community bank at: http://moveyourmoney.info/
Photo by jeffisageek: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teknokool/3729453412/
What are you waiting for? Are we still going to let them deceive us, rip us off, be on top of our economy controlling our society and our lives?
Moving your money into a community bank is one of the single, most powerful actions you can take to weaken these giants and bring back wealth into your family, neighborhood and community!
Put an end to EXPLOITATION NOW!
Join the Organic Movement:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/"The mission of Move Your Money is to encourage individuals and institutions to... more
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following is a transcript of an interview with Robert Johnson by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! about Move Your Money, a project to help people transfer their money from bigger banks into smaller, community-oriented financial institutions that generally avoided the reckless investments and schemes that helped cause the financial crisis. Robert Johnson is former economist at the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Budget Committee. He’s now the director of the Economic Policy Initiative at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
Amy Goodman: So, Move Your Money, how did it come about?
Robert Johnson: Came about at a dinner. Eugene Jarecki, my wife Alexis and Arianna and I were talking about how frustrated people were that there was no legislative reform and there was no -- well, you might call “remorse” from the big bankers. So we started to just, how we say, bat the fat about what could be done. And we talked about how in past episodes people had sold stock, and in this episode, you could get people to move their money.
Why would they move their money when they’re happy with their services? Because they can get comparable services locally. Everything is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, up to $250,000. And they could stop this toxic side effect of derivatives lobbying and “too big to fail” lobbying that’s going on by the top five or six banks that --
Goodman: So, name names. Who are you saying people should -- which banks should they pull their money out of? And what banks should they put them into? Tell us what community banks are, but name the ones they should pull out.
Johnson: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and, to the extent that it’s asset management, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Those are the six that have 97 percent of the derivatives markets. Those are the “too big to fail” institutions, or at least the large subset of the “too big to fail” institutions. But mostly, they’re the ones who are working very hard right now to stop Congress in the Senate from adequately reforming our financial system, which basically means they want to keep playing and making profit and have the taxpayer pick up the bill in the event of another—they hit another banana peel.
Goodman: And explain what community banks are.
Johnson: Community banks are small, regional or very much local institutions. Most of their activities, their lending activities and so forth, relate to the local region or community around which they collect their deposits.
Goodman: And how do know if you’re moving your money into a bank that’s not owned by one of the entities you just talked about?
Johnson: Well, that requires a little bit of research, but we do have friends at Institutional Risk Analytics that’s on this website, moveyourmoney.info, and they have rated all the FDIC call report banks, and they’ve separated out the big banks from the small, or what you might call the behind-the-scenes ownership, and given you a menu. If you plug in your zip code, it gives you a menu of the banks that they rate A or B, which is safe. And like I say, above and beyond that, you have deposit insurance. But those are the local banks that are independently owned, not owned by the big four to six.
More at link above:following is a transcript of an interview with Robert Johnson by Amy Goodman for... more
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How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank.
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Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.
We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?
Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.
Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.
It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. Watch it below.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/move-your-money-a-new-yea_b_406022.htmlLast week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist... more
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