Regulating Ourselves to Death

F*ck Dodd-Frank. You want a corporatocracy, that’s how we get there.

Y’all hate Walmart, Wall Street, Wells Fargo, but you want to regulate anything smaller right out of business. Why?

Little known fact: small business and communities go to shit without community banks. Dodd-Frank is putting them out of business at an unprecedented rate.

Since Dodd-Frank was enacted, we’ve lost a FIFTH of our banks…all small-to-median.

Community banks are small, most have a couple dozen people at most. They buy ATMs in installments.

Onerous regulatory compliance puts them in a bind many can’t get free of- they either sell out to corporate banks or go belly-up.

New banks aren’t coming to replace them. This is a first in US history. In six years since DF was enacted, fewer than 7 new banks were chartered. Compare that to almost 200 at the peak of the recession in 1990.

Lest you think there’s no difference between Main Street bank and say, Wells Fargo, consider: These banks make their money on loans, mostly to local businesses/residents/farmers. Big banks speculate.

Community banks made the first auto loans & service clients big banks won’t touch.

You need these banks. Screwing them out of business isn’t going to make life easier, except for Wells Fargo execs.

Community banks only make about a fourth of all bank loans, but they make HALF of small business loans, half of commercial property loans, and MOST agricultural loans.

You want your organic, locally sourced artisanal heirloom tomatoes, that’s how those little farms get funded.

Small banks didn’t create the financial crisis, the too-big-to-fail billionaire banks did-so why are we murdering the former to benefit the later?