U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has filed a bill to force the Treasury Department to bust up banks and other financial institutions seen as "too big to fail." While consumers damn Wall Street and wait for the government to do something about the behemoths, there's something they can do themselves.
After all, the big banks got big because people put their money in them, and people can take it out. That's the concept behind a growing trend, spearheaded by Move Your Money (moveyourmoney.info), which is fueled by Huffington Post and the Roosevelt Institute, to take deposits out of the megabanks—which often don't give individual depositors very good service anyway—and put them in smaller local banks that didn't get swept up in the subprime lending fiasco.
In many cases these are banks that do a lot of local lending and care about the communities in which they do it, because if the community goes down the drain, the value of their loans goes with it. They're making more loans than larger banks, and many are very sound; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation says the best-capitalized banks in the country now are those with under $1 billion in assets.
To put a new twist on a familiar phrase, Think globally. Bank locally.
In the Valley, the news about Move Your Money is being circulated by Western Massachusetts Jobs for Justice. WMJWJ's Jon Weissman told the Advocate, "There's a bumper sticker about this. It says, 'Don't blame me. I bank locally.' As long as all aspects of justice for workers on the job are honored, local enterprises are better than multinationals. It's about recycling money in the local community."
Visit www.moveyourmoney.com, go to its healthy bank finder and type in your zip code—as people from 16,600 of the country's 42,000 zip codes did within the first week after the site was activated Dec. 29—and you'll find a bank near you that's been given a clean bill of health by Institutional Risk Analytics, a firm that searches FDIC data to evaluate banks.
IRA, which volunteered its efforts to give Move Your Money the bank finder, says you shouldn't doubt that your deposit is important, even as large and complicated as the lending business has become. Core deposits are still the engine of that business, says company spokesman Dennis Santiago, and competition for them is fierce. Plenty of Valley banks are on Move Your Money's IRA-generated good list: Greenfield Savings Bank, Northampton Coop, Easthampton Savings Bank, Florence Savings, Country Bank for Savings, People's United Bank, Westfield Bank and more.
