by David Heim
The recent big news in my hometown, a suburb bordering Chicago, is the closing of a locally owned bank. The bank ended up with many of the bad assets held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it didn’t qualify for a government bailout and didn’t have enough capital of its own to satisfy bank regulators.
The news was especially painful because this bank truly was a community bank: it invested in areas of town where business owners were struggling, and it provided local government with credit for special projects. It provided a no-interest loan to launch a Jesuit high school on Chicago’s West Side, where the public high school had been shut down. The weekly paper was flooded with testimonials about how the bank and its president, Mike Kelly, had been partners in community projects. It seemed every nonprofit and every social cause in town had a story to tell about how Kelly had provided key financial support.
Someone observed that Kelly’s bank was, unbeknownst to most of us, like the Bailey Savings & Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life—part of the glue that held our town together. Kelly was, by all accounts, far from being a George Bailey: he was a shrewd and tough-minded negotiator who ran a highly profitable network of banks. But he also believed that capital and credit were to be used to build community. It was enough to make you want to go into banking—at least the kind of banking Kelly practiced.
November 24, 2009
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1 comments:
Amen! The too often untold tragedy of the current economic disaster in our community is the loss of community banking, which cannot compete with the too big to fail banks that dominate the American Bankers Association. Huge multi-regional banks do not serve communities by reinvesting capital as you have described. And, to make matters worse, several of the large banks capitalize predatory lending companies such as payday lenders who rape our neighborhoods with interest rates from 300-1000 percent APR. So, instead of investing capital in community building, banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America invest capital into community destroying predatory loans. And, to top it all off, these same big banks spend millions lobbying members of congressional oversite and financial services committees to insure that legistlation fails that is designed to protect the interests of our communities, save our homes and protect consumers from usury. As people of faith we serve the Lord of community building, who demonstrated community economy by redistributing resources to feed thousands, binding up the rejected, bringing good news to the poor, challenging corrupt financial practices in the Temple, celebrating the widow's mite, and by rejecting the Roman system of bribery and violent taxation. When we stand by and allow the big banks and investment houses to control government, we may as well shout crucify as community economy is on trial before Pilate. Tell the folks you sent to Capitol Hill to support community economy and that too big to fail is too big to exist!
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