Banksters Feeling Pain from “Move Your Money” Campaign

Back in January, the Allen School Online Blog featured a post called, “Move Your Money – Beat the Greedy Banksters”.  In that post, I outlined options for people disgusted with their treatment by big Wall Street banks who survived the economic collapse thanks to taxpayer bailouts only to jack up credit card interest and withhold loans for school and small business.  In essence, I advocated for others to do as I and many others had; “voting with our feet” by closing accounts held with Citi, Chase, BofA and other biggies and reopening them with local community banks and credit unions.  At the time, many doubted this small action would have any significant impact on the “too big to fail” crew on Wall Street.  Follow me past the jump to see just how successful this idea has been. From the Huffington Post:

“Those who wonder whether public anger at big banks and the Move Your Money sentiment sweeping the country is substantial enough to impact these giants need only look at the banks’ own marketing over the last few weeks to see the proof. In a spate of new advertisements and PR maneuvers, the nation’s largest banks are working hard to win us back. They are, in effect, standing on our doorstep, flowers in hand, trying to convince us they’ve changed.

They’re using words like “local” and “community,” because they know quite well that there’s a rival for our affections. A recent Zogby poll found that nearly one in ten Americans had moved at least some of their business to small banks or credit unions.”   Read the whole post here.

It would seem that there has been a significant amount of flight from the big banks.  So much so that they are preparing to spend millions this year on advertising to burnish their tarnished reputations.  But lest we forget, their advertising budgets are still dwarfed by the volume of cash they are preparing to spend on lobbyist efforts to kill any substantive financial regulation that would protect average Americans from the mal effects of the Banksters’ activities which torpedoed the US economy in the first place.  So I would urge everyone reading this to (if you haven’t already) move your accounts to local banks or credit unions.  More importantly, don’t believe the banks when they say they’ve changed.  They haven’t.  At least not yet.