The Gary Null Blog

Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by Dissent

http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=600

by Mark Engler

This past Saturday was “Bank Transfer Day,” a day of action in which thousands of people moved their money from “too big to fail” banking titans into credit unions and smaller regional banks. While it’s hard to tell precisely how many people followed through on their threats to close accounts on Saturday itself, over the past month credit unions have added 650,000 new members (as opposed to 80,000 in a regular month), resulting in more than $4.5 billion in new deposits.

As Sarah Jaffe at Alternet noted, ABC News aired a remarkable report calling the exodus of customers a “bank revolt” and stating, “as of today, 1 million consumers are hurling a lightning-bolt warning at the big banks, moving their money out in protest.”

Now, a lot of the impact of closing accounts might have been symbolic, and $4.5 billion might not be all that much money relative to the size of the banking system as a whole. But, asSalon’s Andrew Leonard writes, riffing on an old joke, “$4.5 billion here, $4.5 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money, even for JPMorgan-Chase.”