The Industry Behind America’s Money Problems

The Bank of America logo is seen outside a branch in Washington on July 9, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

In their glorious magnanimity, Bank of America has announced it’s cutting its overdraft fees.

Now when you stretch past your means, you’ll no longer be penalized $35… but only $10. (Of course, that doesn’t start until May.) More banks are expected to follow this trend.

It’s no small act of generosity on their part. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “we estimate that the overall market revenue from overdraft and NSF fees was $15.47 billion in 2019.”

On BofA’s most recent earnings call with investors, they estimated their hit as a result of the fee reduction to be roughly $750 million to $1 billion.

So the cost of banking is going to get a little cheaper for many Americans.

But I don’t think that should be the headline.

Does it strike you as odd that the industry makes that much money from overdrafts? From people extending beyond their means?

I don’t have a problem with penalizing an individual a few bucks for irresponsible behavior. But these kinds of revenues don’t come from the occasional bounced check. What this is, is an overdraft epidemic. And it says something about the state of our actual economy.

How Broke Have People Become?

Recently our commander in chief expounded on how well the economy was doing, especially from the perspective of the wage earner. … “Things are a hell of a lot better, and the wages have gone up higher, faster than inflation.”

To be fair, every administration tells you how well you’re doing. The last president who came out and told the truth about an economic situation was Jimmy Carter who became the poster boy for what NOT to say when you’re president.

But the truth is, things are not as rosy as they once were.

From WWII to the 1970s there was a thing called “shared prosperity”—when incomes across all classes rose at roughly the same pace. You know the rest of this story.

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

Spending on housing, transportation, health care, and education have all been on the rise since the 1940s. And the actual wealth of the average American has lagged behind.

How did everyone get so poor?

You Can Thank the Banks

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the father of the world’s most (in)famous banking dynasty, was rumored to have once said, “Give me control of a country’s money, and I care not who makes the laws.” Nobody knows for sure if he actually said it, but if he did, he wouldn’t be wrong.

Controlling the capital of a nation is a big, important—and occasionally dangerous—business.

If you make yourself the source of that capital, you’re pretty much right in the middle of the mix.

The Federal Reserve is the United States’ modern-day Rothschild Dynasty. It’s the central planning organization of a nationwide banking cartel. Its main job is to make sure that its member banks don’t get overly reckless, and when they do (and they always do) they survive the carnage they create.

For those of you who can remember all the way back to the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008, you already understand this.

The problem is the banking industry has become an economy of its own. Creating money out of thin air by leveraging depositors’ money and then collecting a fee on the loan.

That’s actually a pretty quaint description. The truth is, today they’ve found way more diabolical and dangerous ways to create money out of thin air.

In 2020 the financial sector accounted for 22 percent of the country’s GDP. Services and government combined made up another 25 percent. And actual manufacturing accounted for only 11 percent.

The basis of our economy has shifted. We’ve gone from a real economy producing real value, to a financial economy. We sell a lot of crap made in China but create precious little value on a relative basis. When an economy doesn’t create value but rather prints profits out of thin air, well. ...

You can thank the banks... they made you poor.

Given that we’re all living in a world of financial fiat value, one way to capitalize on it would be to allocate some of your capital into the commodities sector. Investments like the ELEMENTS Rogers International Commodity Index and the United States Commodity Index Fund would be good bets for this.