Move Your Money Campaign

December 31st, 2009

Arianna Huffington, the founder and publisher of the Huffington post has introduced on her website the “Move Your Money campaign”.   She is suggesting that people close accounts with the “Too Big to Fail” or “Too Politically Connected to Fail” banks, and invest their money into small community banks.    She created a website, called moveyourmoney.info, which includes a widget that will let find small local banks by zipcode.
She writes:

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks — JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Switching your accounts can take a lot of time and can be a hassle, so it remains to be seen if this grass roots campaign will translate into action that makes the big banks take notice.

You can find local banks and interest rates on RateZip.com by city, state and zip.


GMAC’s New ALLY Bank – Rates too High?

June 14th, 2009

ABA President Edward Yingling recently wrote to FDIC Chief Sheila Blair, concerned about the aggressive rate practices of ALLY Bank.   He wrote that “fast asset growth supported by aggressive deposit gathering strategies is a strong sign of high financial risk activity.”   Will the FDIC start telling banks soon that the interest rates they are paying on CD and Savings accounts are too high?



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