Tag: FDIC

Pick Your Poison: Abandoning Regulated Banking in Search of Financial Inclusion

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

  • Transaction and savings accounts are critical to financial security and inter-generational economic equality.
  • Nonbank offerings might increase financial inclusion, but pose risks to safeguarding savings, personal privacy, and consumer protection unless or until consumer-finance standards symmetrically apply to banks and nonbanks offering like-kind products to vulnerable households.
  • Public-utility, postal, or CBDC alternatives to bank accounts are a long way off and may not effectively safeguard high-risk households. 
  • Expanding low-cost, no-risk bank accounts is a critical near-term policy option.
Continue reading “Pick Your Poison: Abandoning Regulated Banking in Search of Financial Inclusion” →

More Ways to Make an Equality Bank Make a Difference

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

After we last year proposed “Equality Banks,” ideas flooded in on possible charters.  We also heard from those who so distrust any venture involving private finance that they believe only a public bank suffices to ensure fair delivery of equality-essential deposit, loan, and payment products.  In this blog post, we build on prior work to lay out an array of charter options suitable for different types of Equality Banks owned by different types of financial or private investors.  We reiterate our worries about public banks, adding to our prior evaluation of state and municipal efforts with an analysis of “low-income” credit unions and of the only equality-focused federal public bank to date.  Each of these well-intentioned initiatives in fact made U.S. inequality a little bit worse, providing important lessons as progressive Democrats ready a raft of proposals not only to craft public banks, but also even to make the Postal Service or Federal Reserve become one. Continue reading “More Ways to Make an Equality Bank Make a Difference” →

Robinhood and the Sheriff of Nottingham: The Fintech Financial-Inclusion Illusion

~ Karen Petrou ~ Leave a comment

By Karen Petrou

On December 14, a fintech venture dubbing itself Robinhood launched a consumer-banking product touting a no-fee, high-return, and yet somehow still profitable checking, savings, brokerage, and payment product.  It didn’t take long to see that Robinhood would steal from the poor to feed the rich.  Speculative investors have somehow bid the company up to a $5.6 billion valuation despite, as even a cursory analysis of public documentation shows, a flawed business model premised on a series of increasingly improbable assumptions about the transformative powers of financial technology and the malleability of U.S. financial regulation.  Continue reading “Robinhood and the Sheriff of Nottingham: The Fintech Financial-Inclusion Illusion” →

SIFIs and Sisyphus: The Latest Bank-Regulation Rewrite

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By Karen Petrou

Starting in 2010, U.S. regulators erected a pyramid of complex, costly, and stringent safety-and-soundness, resolution-planning, and conduct regulations for the largest U.S. banking organizations that have come to be called SIFIs (i.e., systemically-important financial institutions).  Starting in 2018, the agencies began to demolish the still-incomplete SIFI pyramid, issuing on October 31 two sweeping proposals (here and here) not only to implement new U.S. law, but also to go farther.  Bankers say this is nice, but not enough; critics lambast the proposals as forerunners of the next financial crisis.  Either could be right – the proposals repeat the most fundamental mistake of post-crisis financial regulation:  rules piled upon rules or, now, rules subtracted from rules without even an effort to anticipate how all of the revised rules work taken altogether in the financial marketplace as it exists in the real world, not in a set of academic papers or political edicts. Continue reading “SIFIs and Sisyphus: The Latest Bank-Regulation Rewrite” →

How to Craft a 21st-Century Equality Bank

~ Federal Financial Analytics ~ 6 Comments

By Federal Financial Analytics

Reflecting a lot of questions and commentary, the American Banker last week published an op-ed by Karen Petrou showing how to build the bankers’ banks to solve at least some of our economic-inequality problems.  Many proposals seek to do so via the U.S. Postal Service, but an Equality Bank is at least as powerful and comes only from the private-sector. Continue reading “How to Craft a 21st-Century Equality Bank” →