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Banking

How The Ghana Susu System Helps The African Diaspora

August 25, 2022 Amidu Mutaru, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
I was born in Nalerigu village in northeastern Ghana. For most of my life, I watched as my mother, Mariama, worked as a trader and used Susu to meet her financial needs. My mother used money from susu to pay my school fees and to carry out her trade business. Ghana’s Susu system is widely used by the people. Susu means “small small” in the Twi language (Amankwah et al. 2019:2). I only knew about Susu as a banking tradition in Ghana. I did not know that I would come to learn of its activity in a ‘developed’ country when I moved to Toronto, Canada to carry out my doctoral studies in anthropology. In the Spring 2022 I was hired as a research assistant to work on a project to understand rotating savings and credit associations – known as ROSCAs.

Public Banking Learning Circle

March 25, 2022 An Economy of Our Own. , ,
Public Banking can save the planet, close the equity gap, address systemic racism, stop funding weapons and global wars, and level the playing field for women and families. Learn more in the first series of our special and accessible workshops for women—and become a skilled advocate for economic change in your community! This is an entirely digital, small-group series of six sessions offered at a sliding scale. We'll kick off our first session on Friday, April 8th at 8pm eastern/5pm pacific. Then we'll meet together five more Fridays, at the same time (8pm eastern/5pm pacific), on April 29th, May 20th, June 10th, July 1st and July 22nd.All registration fees are donations that will fuel our work to make this information widely accessible.

Unimpressed With Post Office Banking Trial, Backers Eye New Initiative

March 2, 2022 Caitlin Reilly, Roll Call. , , ,
As lawmakers work on finishing fiscal 2022 appropriations, they’ll have to decide whether to keep a House spending provision that would allow some post offices to offer more financial services. Coming in the wake of a largely ignored U.S. Postal Service test of a check-cashing service, a new initiative could test whether the Postal Service can attract millions of Americans who now lack banking services, serve areas largely vacated by banks and make money by doing so. Those tests depend on the Senate going along with the $6 million for a pilot project in the House’s fiscal 2022 Financial Services appropriations bill. Lawmakers are trying to finish the appropriations work before the current continuing resolution expires on March 11.

Postal Banking Is Finally A Reality In (Some Of) The United States

October 19, 2021 Donald Cohen, In These Times. , ,
The crisis[Covid-19 pandemic] has wreaked economic havoc on working Americans. But U.S. billionaires have gotten 62 percent richer during the pandemic, while over 86 million Americans lost jobs, some 3 million households now report concerns of imminent eviction, and essential workers — particularly Latino, Indigenous and Black workers — continue to die from Covid-19 at disproportionate rates.

Democratise Central Banks

October 6, 2021 Grace Blakeley, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
In the US, two senior central bank officials recently stepped down after concerns were raised about their trading activities during the pandemic. Robert Kaplan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, will step down next month, and Eric Rosengren, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, will step down at the end of September. Both were actively involved in financial markets at the beginning of the year, and therefore stood personally to benefit when the Federal Reserve made the unprecedented decision to extend its asset purchasing programme (what most of you will know as quantitative easing) to a number of different markets. The Fed not only created new money to purchase long-dated government bonds, it also actively intervened in corporate, consumer, and municipal debt markets – effectively propping up thousands of private companies, many of which then provided bumper returns to their shareholders.

Banks Have Made $18 Billion From ‘Paycheck Protection Program’ Processing Fees

August 22, 2020 By Colleen Boyle, In These Times. , , ,
Whether or not a sin­gle job or com­pa­ny is saved through the CARES Act’s Pay­check Pro­tec­tion Pro­gram (PPP), lenders will be paid hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in tax­pay­er mon­ey. As of mid-July, PPP lenders, includ­ing JPMor­gan Chase Bank, Bank of Amer­i­ca and Wells Far­go, had racked up $18 bil­lion in fees—more than was allo­cat­ed to oth­er pro­grams to devel­op vac­cines, pro­vide med­ical sup­plies and health ser­vices, and feed chil­dren. Near­ly $130 bil­lion in PPP funds have gone untapped, yet both the HEROES Act passed by the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in May and the HEALS Act intro­duced by the Sen­ate in late July call for the program’s exten­sion while remov­ing require­ments that most of its fund­ing be spent on payroll.

Banking For The People, Not Wall Street Profits

January 27, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. , ,
It has been a hundred years since the first and only public bank was created in the United States, in North Dakota, but now there is renewed interest in starting more public banks. California passed a law last year allowing public banks. New Jersey and New York are not far behind. To explain why public banks are necessary and describe the growing movement for them, we speak with Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute. She discusses the benefits of public banks, how they save money and free up funds for necessary public projects and what the obstacles are. Brown also writes about financial issues. She talks about the current crisis in the repo market that is brewing in the United States and how it makes the economy precarious.

Marijuana Goes To House Floor With Landslide Victory For SAFE Banking Act

September 26, 2019 Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance , ,
For the first time since the war on marijuana was declared by President Richard Nixon, progressive marijuana law reform was considered on the Floor of the House of Representatives, and won by a landslide. Now, it is likely to be considered by the Senate. Yesterday, members of the House of Representatives voted 321 to 103 in favor HR 1595: The SAFE Banking Act, which amends federal law so that explicitly banks and other financial institutions may work directly with state-legal marijuana businesses.  If the SAFE Banking Act becomes law it will be a major advancement for legal and medical marijuana sales.

More Financial Institutions Are Working With The Marijuana Industry

July 5, 2019 By Kyle Jaeger, Marijuana Moment , ,
Banks and credit unions have been accepting significantly more marijuana businesses in 2019, according to new federal data. At the end of the last quarter of 2018, there were 438 banks and 113 credit unions actively servicing cannabis businesses. By March 2019, those numbers grew to 493 and 140, respectively. That data comes from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which tracks financial services for the marijuana industry by analyzing suspicious activity reports, or SARs, that institutions file in accordance with cannabis banking guidance issued by the Obama administration in 2014.

Media Blackout As Israel’s Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion In Fines For US Tax Evasion Schemes

April 3, 2019 Whitney Webb, Intrepidreport.com , ,
WASHINGTON—Israel’s three largest banks—Hapoalim Bank, Leumi Bank and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank—have all been ordered to pay record fines, which collectively are set to total over $1 billion, to the U.S. government after the banks were found to have actively colluded with thousands of wealthy Americans in massive tax-evasion schemes. The scandal, though it has been reported on in Israeli media, has garnered little attention in the United States. The media blackout has been so surprising it was even directly mentioned by the Times of Israel...

Finally Obey MLK, Liberation Is Black Owned Banking

January 21, 2019 By Amani Sawari, Sawarimi.org , ,
On April 3, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech, pleading with Black America to shift their wealth into Black owned institutions the night before his assassination. It is by no coincidence that his death came shortly after the world renowned speaker gave this radical advice to the millions who had been following his lead. Imagine where we would have been as a people if we’d gotten into the habit of Black banking in the 60s rather than continuing to allow ourselves to be dependent on institutions that do little to serve our community. The potential for Black banking to disrupt the American exploitation of Blacks was so great that MLK did not make it through the next 24hrs.

Losing Amazon

December 1, 2018 Ted Howard, The American Prospect. , , ,
Last week, the cities still in the running for Amazon’s HQ2 officially found out the bad news: despite months of effort and billions of dollars in subsidies assembled, they will not be the new home for Amazon’s much ballyhooed second corporate headquarters, now split between two expansions in New York and Arlington, Virginia. This is, of course, how the game was going to go. The corporate attraction strategy behind these failed bids is premised on scarcity: in the end, it’s a zero-sum competition between cities. As the indefatigable researchers at Good Jobs First have amply demonstrated, this competition often turns into a race to the bottom, leading to questionable value for ordinary city residents as subsidies are lavished to bring the next big thing to town.

The Crisis Next Time: Planning For Public Ownership As An Alternative To Corporate Bank Bailouts

July 3, 2018 By Thomas Hanna, Thenextsystem.org , , ,
The next financial crisis is all but inevitable. While its exact timing and severity cannot be predicted, both the accelerating frequency of crises in recent decades and the continued consolidation of the banking sector in an increasingly financialized economy suggest that we should be prepared for a crisis sooner rather than later. In the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, the US federal government intervened at an unprecedented scale to bailout our largest commercial banks after they became entangled in the mess of risky financial products built on top of an unsustainable housing bubble. The effect of these massive bailouts was, in the end, to preserve the status quo: the modest attempts made to regulate the financial sector to protect consumers and avert further devastating financial crises have largely been rolled back, and the banks that were then “too big to fail” are today even bigger.

What It Will Take For Public Banking To Win

May 26, 2018 Matt Stannard, Occupy.com , , ,
In 2014, then-Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales recognized that poverty and shrinking city budgets were problems that needed out-of-the-box solutions. Deeply concerned with inequality, Gonzales welcomed a discussion about public banking and even participated in a conference featuring leading figures in the movement. He later cheered on his Santa Fe City Council’s approval of a feasibility study that concluded that a city-owned bank would have an impact of millions of dollars a year in savings and investment potential for the city. After the study, though not particularly because of it, Gonzales’s position would gradually move from supportive to lukewarm. This should have come as no surprise. Whenever a citizens group pushes for the public takeover of any sector of the financial industry, bankers and financial professionals push back.

The Return Of The Great Meltdown

April 28, 2018 Nomi Prins, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
We have entered a landmark moment: no president since Woodrow Wilson (during whose administration the Federal Reserve was established) will have appointed as many board members to the Fed as Donald Trump. His fingerprints will, in other words, not just be on Supreme Court decisions, but no less significantly Fed policy-making for years to come -- even though, like that court, it occupies a mandated position of political independence.
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