Despite the various “Occupy Wall Street” and other grass-roots movements around the country, banks, bankers, and investment bankers really don’t seem to get it. Oh, they understand that people are unhappy, but, from what I can tell, they don’t seem terribly willing to accept their own role in creating this unhappiness.
It certainly didn’t help that all the large banks ducked out of the government TARP program as soon as possible so that they wouldn’t be subject to restrictions on salaries and bonuses for top executives – bonuses that often exceeded a million dollars an executive and were sometimes far, far greater. They all insist, usually off the record, that they feared “losing” top talent, but where would that talent go? To other banks?
Then after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on essentially fraudulently rated securitized mortgage assets, they took hundreds of billions of dollars in federal money, but apparently not to lend very much of it, especially not to small businesses, who are traditionally the largest creators of new jobs in the country. At the same time, they continue to foreclose on real estate on a wholesale basis, even when ordered not to by judges and states and regulators and even in cases when refinancing was feasible with an employed homeowner.
And then… there’s the entire question of why the banks are having financial difficulties. I’m an economist by training, and I have problems understanding this. They’re getting money cheaply, in some cases, almost for free, because what they pay depositors is generally less than one percent, and they can obtain federal funds at an even lower rate.
Mortgages are running 4-6%, and interest on credit card debt is in the 20% range and often in excess of 25%. Yet this vast differential between the cost of obtaining the product and the return on it apparently isn’t sufficient?
And that brings us to the latest bank fiasco. For years, the banks, all of them, have been urging customers to “go paperless.” Check your statement electronically; don’t write checks; use your debit card instead. Then, after the federal government tried to crack down on excessive fees for late payments, overdrafts, and the like, now several of the largest banks are floating the idea of a monthly fee for debit card use. Wait a second! Wasn’t this the banks’ idea in the first place? Wasn’t it supposed to reduce costs? So why are they going to charge depositors more to use their own money?
And the banks still don’t get it? With all those brilliant, highly compensated executives?
Or don’t they care?