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(Image via leftyjenkins)
Be honest, how many of you are doing this? How many of you are not? For what reason(s)?
My boyfriend just set up an account at a credit union in Kansas just this week, after my insistence. As for myself, my first bank account was through a very, very small bank in the even smaller town of Baldwin City, KS (the only two existing branches were located approximately half a mile from one another). When I moved back to the East Coast, I set up an account with RBC Bank in North Carolina. I walked in very skeptical of placing a single penny of my modest fortune (roughly $1,000 of graduation money) in a bank any larger than Baldwin State Bank (I cannot emphasize how local that bank was) and asked what I believed at the time were hard hitting questions: “Why should I put my money here? How much did your bank receive from the bailout? What was the relative health of this bank during the 2008 crisis?” I was assured that no money was received from the bailout, and that RBC was a regional bank loyal to its North Carolina customers.
What I should done, instead, was five minutes worth of research to figure out that none of the claims made by my RBC Bank representative were true. According to data from Probublica, RBC Bank is committed to $270,000 of bailout money, having disbursed $8,137 as of July 31. Granted, this is a miniscule amount when compared to Bank of America’s $45,000,000,000 (Lord, those are a lot of zeros), and only amounts to less than 0.1% of all bailout funds, but when I ask a question I expect an honest answer. How idealistic, I know. Additionally, RBC Bank is not a sweet little North Carolina bank. On June 19 of this year, Reuters reported that RBC Bank was being bought out by PNC Financial Services Group INC for an estimated $3.45 billion, potentially bumping PNC to the status of fifth largest bank in the United States . If you read the Reuters article carefully, you’ll find this little gem: “JPMorgan Chase & Co is advising RBC on the sale, while Bank of America Merrill Lynch is advising PNC.” JP Morgan. Chase. Bank of America. Merrill Lynch. Do these guys sound familiar? Sure they do, they were in that one movie, the 2008 summer blockbuster Dude, Where’s My Retirement?
As I’m currently living in France, I doubt I’ll be moving my money tomorrow. But know this: there is no way on god’s green earth that I am keeping my money in a bailout-receiving, bought out, JP Morgan Chase & Co advised bank one second longer than I have to come January 2012. So for the rest of you fine citizens, to the individuals who have accessibility to their bank accounts and are able to transfer their hard earned money to credit unions and other cooperative financial institutions, I strongly urge you to do it. What the above graphic implies is right: a “Big Bank” is only as tall as the citizens it stands on.
