Would someone please do a wellness check up on me sometime this week, I just found myself agreeing with President Trump.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, the president suggested he wanted to go back to the days of Glass-Steagall and force banks to separate their consumer banking from their investment banks. I can wholly support that but I don’t think that goes far enough.
Over the past year I have seen articles on reasons to break up the banks and reasons why we shouldn’t. I found areas of agreement in both…but my common sense says we go for it…’Ma Bell’ them so to speak.
Take the ten largest national banks and split them into at least five geographical divisions each. And make sure these geographical splits aren’t the same areas for each of the banks. Make sure they overlap in different combinations. Increase the number of competing banks in each of their markets as possible. Make them small enough that they have to be responsive to their local consumers: Act more like local banks instead of national conglomerates that have no soul, no local responsibility, no personality.
It is a natural for the GOP. It increases competition in the free market. And it is a natural for the Senator Elizabeth Warren/Senator Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrats…no banks remaining that are too big to fail.
And look at it as a jobs bill. We go from 10 national headquarters to 50 regional headquarters overnight!
So breaking out the investment banks from the consumer banks is just the first step…
What doesn’t make any sense:
Shares of large banks gave up some of their gains following the Bloomberg report, but stayed in positive territory.
Near 1730 GMT, JPMorgan Chase was up 0.6 percent at $87.46, Citigroup was up 0.8 percent at $59.61 and Bank of America was up 1.2 percent at $23.61.
One might want to pay very careful attention to the man behind the curtain on this one.