Banking

Democratise Central Banks

October 6, 2021 Grace Blakeley, Tribune Magazine. Create! Banking, Corruption, Finance and the Economy, New Economy

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. Educate! Banking, COVID-19, Paycheck Protection Program, wealth inequality

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. Podcast Banking, Banking and Finance, Public Bank

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 Create! Banking, Legalization, Marijuana

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 Create! Banking, Marijuana, Marijuana Legalization

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 Educate! Banking, Israel, Tax Evasion

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 Create! Banking, Black Capitalism, Revisionism

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. Create! Amazon, Banking, Cooperatives, New Economy

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 Create! Banking, Crisis, Finance, Public ownership

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 Strategize! Banking, California, New Economy, Public Banking

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. Educate! Banking, Economic collapse, Federal Reserve, Wall Street

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.

Cooperative Banking For Black Lives

March 5, 2018 Valerie Vande Panne, Inthesetimes.com Create! Banking, Black Capitalism, Black Nationalism, Cooperatives, New Economy

MINNEAPOLIS—On an unseasonably warm Friday in late January, African-American business owners, activists, advocates, musicians, politicians and artists toasted with a “come-up” cocktail: a healthy mix of Goldschläger, vodka and sparkling cider over ice. A “come-up” signifies making it to the next level—and assembled community members used the moment to reflect on recent progress and envision the years to come. The party, hosted by the Association for Black Economic Power (ABEP) at its new office in North Minneapolis, celebrated the growing local movement to empower the black community to invest in its own neighborhoods and divest from systemic harms (such as institutions that extract local resources and wealth). And there was much to celebrate: For one, the 2017 city council victories of event speakers Andrea Jenkins (the first African-American, openly trans woman to be elected to public office) and Jeremiah Ellison (son of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison).

Not A Matter Of If, But When

February 18, 2018 Shawn Hattingh, MR Online. Educate! Banking, Capitalism, Debt, Stock Market

In early January 2018, capitalists across the globe were celebrating the fact that the Dow Jones had rallied by 45% since the election of Donald Trump. Likewise, brokers were beaming in Sandton when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange hit a high of 61,475 points (up a staggering 300% compared to early 2009 when at one point it sat at 18,465 points). Yet beneath all the exuberance, danger signs abound—including signs that stock, bond and debt markets are experiencing bubbles, which will burst at some point.

How Uncle Sam Launders Marijuana Money

January 22, 2018 Ellen Brown, Truthdig. Educate! Banking, Criminal Justice System, Marijuana

Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have laws broadly legalizing marijuana in some form. The herb has been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma, lung disease, anxiety, muscle spasms, hepatitis C, inflammatory bowel disease, and arthritis pain. The community of Americans who rely on legal medical marijuana was estimated to be 2.6 million people in 2016 and includes a variety of mainstream constituency groups like veterans, senior citizens, cancer survivors, and parents of epileptic children.

Student Debt Slavery II: Level The Playing Field

January 7, 2018 Ellen Brown, Web of Debt Blog Educate! Banking, Public Banks, Student Debt

The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself. “Students should not be asked to pay more on their debt than they can afford,” said Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail in October 2016. “And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives.”

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