Tom's Corner: Big banks

(NEWSCHANNEL 3) – The big banks are coming under fire for their part in the financial collapse, Senators have been grilling back leaders and financial regulators, and now Tom Van Howe's piling on.

In this week's installment of Tom's Corner, he says it's time for a change.

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It's time to move your money.

It's time to move your money as part of a grassroots effort to break up the big banks.

I'm talking about the really big banks, the Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and so on, that consider themselves too big to fail.

Too big to fail, they say, because they are so gigantic that failure would cause disastrous ripple effects in our economy.

The U.S. Senate recently held hearings on their nefarious banking practices, practices involving toxic mortgages that nearly brought us to the brink of collapse. The Senators talked tough, talking about regulating Wall Street, and then invited many of these same people to donate to their reelection campaings.

Now, the Senate has voted down a measure to break up the big banks, a measure which was designed to diminish their stranglehold on the country.

Since the Senate voted it down that leaves it up to consumers to break them up, to take matters into their own hands.

These are the banks who sold bundled toxic mortgages, and essentially bought insurance on a bet the mortgages would fail. They made billions of dollars in the process, guaranteeing huge bonuses for themselves, but not quite enough to fulfill the basic function of loaning money to those who desperately needed it.

Now, having paid back the TARP funds that bailed them out, the big banks are resisting reform and are already back to chasing high-risk trading strategies.

This is unacceptable behavior.

If your savings and checking is with one of the big banks, where they are paying you virtually nothing for your patronage, move it. Get it out of there.

Where do you move it to? In this era of bigger banks devouring smaller ones its sometimes hard to know which banks are truly local, but its easy to find a credit union.

Credit unions can beat banks in almost every loan category because they're non-profit and don't have to pay taxes. They don't have stockholders looking for a return on their investment, and if there are excess funds, they are returned to members as dividends.

Credit unions are as close to George Bailey's bank in 'It's a Wonderful Life' as we're going to find these days.

The big banks are arrogant and out of control. If Congress won't act, we can and should.