America's banks have always been shady.
As foreclosures
Trim our ranks,
The biggest scoundrels
Are still the banks.
Trim our ranks,
The biggest scoundrels
Are still the banks.
The nation’s big banks
are making big profits again. Whew! I was a little worried there for a minute.
During America’s recent financial meltdown we actually lost a few biggies, and plenty more nearly crashed on the rocks.
Well, you can relax now…banks are rolling in clover once more. And they’re still steering the wheel of government.
During America’s recent financial meltdown we actually lost a few biggies, and plenty more nearly crashed on the rocks.
Well, you can relax now…banks are rolling in clover once more. And they’re still steering the wheel of government.
Running the government
has advantages. It assures that neither presidents nor Congress will advance
laws bringing bankers to justice. Stern regulators? They will be neither
appointed nor confirmed. It means that even egregious cases of bank fraud,
corruption, and miscellaneous villainy won’t be prosecuted, even if they may
get negotiated from time to time.
Thus, even when
tycoons admit error and pay billions in fines, no one goes to jail. Fines have
become merely a cost of doing business.
Yes, America’s banks
have always been shady, even before that celebrated event when they were
temporarily thrown out of the Temple. The big ones unleashed the crash of 1929
as well as the burst housing bubble that fueled the Great Recession.
Small banks, though,
once gave the industry a good name. They managed our childhood nickels and
dimes, paid interest, and loaned our parents money for cars and homes. They
even gave out lollipops and toasters. It was a wonderful life.
Now, not so much.
Small banks mostly bide their time until they can cash out to big ones. The big
ones, in turn, have learned to make their killing on fees, leaning heavily on
gouging the poor. The fine print is where their profits lie…late fees,
overdrafts, small loan charges, and service fees of every description dominate
the business.
And now even some
state governments are playing their game by sending out tax refunds not as
checks, but as debit cards. More fees aplenty for the bank while the state lays
off the check writers.
Meanwhile at the
global level, big banks play games in the stratosphere. In the LIBOR scandal,
shaping up to be the biggest scam in history, several large banks were caught manipulating
international interest rates.
A few chaps in England
may actually do time. But none of our American guys will land in the slammer.
We prefer not to arrest bankers. For all the crookedness in the securitized
mortgage scandal, no one has yet been pinched. And a U.S. District Court judge
in Manhattan ruled in late March in favor of the big banks. Her decision further decreased the odds that
they’ll ever learn that rigging interest rates doesn’t pay.
OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org