State Owned Banks

Tired of giving business to big banks? Maybe you can become the state's customer instead. More U.S. states are exploring the possibility of establi...

We may not be able to beat the banks, but we don't have to play their game. We can take our marbles and go home.

The Fed's second round of "quantitative easing" involved $600 billion for the purchase of long-term government bonds. But the government never actually got the money; it went straight into the reserve accounts of foreign banks.

California is the eighth largest economy in the world, and it has a debt burden to match. As large as California's liabilities are, they are exceeded by its assets. That makes Assembly Bill 750 particularly significant.

The Japanese government can afford its enormous debt because it owns the bank that is its principal creditor. But competitors are attempting to force the bank's privatization.

The budget woes of Wisconsin and other states were not caused by overspending on employee benefits. The "cure" is to get credit flowing again in the local economy, and this can be done by using state assets to capitalize state-owned banks.

Responding to an unfilled need for credit, three states in the last month -- Oregon, Washington and Maryland -- have introduced bills for state-owned banks.

Bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states actively moving to create public banking facilities.

For two years, politicians have danced around the nationalization issue, but ForeclosureGate may be the last straw. The megabanks are too big to fail...

China's government can direct its banks to advance credit in the national currency as needed, because it owns the banks. Ironically, the Chinese evidently got that idea from us.

The giant banks can be broken up and replaced with a network of publicly-owned banks and community banks, which could do a substantially better job of serving consumers and businesses than Wall Street is doing now.

While local banks are held in check by the new banking czars in Basel, Wall Street's "shadow banking system" has hardly been curbed by regulators at all.

Last week, England's new government said it would abandon the previous government's stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts.

California is in the anomalous position of being $26 billion in the red and plunging toward bankruptcy, while it has over $70 billion stashed away in an investment pool that it cannot touch.

Our private, profit-driven banking sector has been bleeding wealth from the rest of the economy. Public-interest banks can transfuse the economy with the credit it needs to flourish and be productive once again.

(AP) The Bank of North Dakota - the nation's only state-owned bank - might seem to be a relic. But now officials in other states are wondering if it ...

Why is North Dakota doing so well, when other states are suffering the ravages of a deepening credit crisis? Its secret may be that it has its own credit machine.

Where can our floundering community banks get the capital to make room on their books for substantial new loans? An innovative answer is provided by the state of North Dakota.