Fury at Wall St. Banks Fuels Public Action for Move Your Money Campaign

Since the burst of the financial bubble in 2008, and surely before, millions of Americans have watched as their life savings dwindled to fumes. Unemployment has held steady at 10 percent or above (among minority groups, it will likely hit the 20s this year) and one in five Americans went hungry last year. As the human recession has worsened, Congress has been slow to act to quell it, while they've rushed to the aid of too-big-to-fail banks.

A new campaign called Move Your Money aims to tackle the frustrations with the Wall Street banks, and the politicians they've bought off, head on. The campaign is based on a simple idea: Americans ought to move their money from the big banks -- that took billions in taxpayer money and continue to foist outrageous interest rates even as they cut lending --  to local financial institutions that actually are a part of their communities. Move the money back home. 

In the first 48 hours of the campaign, which launched days before the New Year, over 100,000 people responded with inquiries on how to move their money and credit to the nation's 7,600 community banks and 8,000 credit unions.

Channeling anger for change

The action campaign isn't the first to base itself on widespread anger toward the largest banks in the country. In April last year, that anger was channeled into A New Way Forward (ANWF). The group organized protests across the country that sought to break up the "zombie" banks.

The worst of the bad guys, nearly everyone agrees, are the so-called Big Six: JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Experts believe the first four alone hold at least 40 percent of our nation's deposits and half of all bank assets.

But despite ANWF's nationwide rallies -- which remained relatively small, though attended by voters of all political stripes -- breaking up the banks has never been on the legislative table. That may be one reason why Move Your Money has garnered so much excitement. It does not seek to force people on the Hill or in the White House, many of whom are indebted to banking interests, to act.

Instead, Move Your Money calls for direct action by regular people who are irate at the overly cautious pace of financial reform.

"Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?" wrote Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson -- she of the Huffington Post, he of the Roosevelt Institute -- in their campaign introduction. They framed Move Your Money as a New Year's resolution for all (most) Americans who feel abandoned by their massive, bailed-out banks.

The campaign comes at an interesting time for small financial institutions. Since the 1980s, the number of banks with assets of $1 billion or less has fallen by more than half, according to Stacy Mitchell, head of the New Rules' Community Banking Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

As small banks and credit unions have gone out of business or been eaten up by the big banks, Americans have gotten used to banking at a distance. The banking experience is now usually characterized by automatic tellers, automated phone-trees, and other forms of faceless communication.

Of course, the growth of national banks has increased some conveniences, such as ATMs you can access anywhere in the country, but who cares about saving two dollars on your withdrawals when your bank is perfectly willing to up your credit card rate from 4.99 to 40.99 percent in one fell swoop (as Citi did to one man with good credit) for no fathomable reason? You're just as faceless to them as they are to you.

With examples such as these, Move Your Money hopes to dispel longstanding myths that big banks are cheaper -- and nicer -- than smaller ones.