OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: I Called it Right! I Called it Wrong

NOTE: On the other hand, it should also be mentioned that credit unions are, indeed, used in America and certainly could be a great model for some non-USA regions to consider. Kuwait, where I am currently living, does not have credit unions at all.

INVESTING AND SAVING LOCALLY

In both urban areas, like Kuwait, and in rural developing regions, like Nicaragua, there has been a consistent lack of a capital for funding the creation of (or building of) banking-credit service networks and providing loans in many of the poorer rural areas of the planet. They have not been put together due to lack of initial capital input, i.e. a problem which a national post-office bank could have overcame.

As a matter of fact, I am certain that the Japanese post-office banking model was appropriated from Europe nearly a century ago. After WWII, Japanese quickly began stuffing their hard earns savings into such a post office bank—i.e. until they had saved enough to open other more speculative accounts with private banks.

For over 20 years, from Peru to Thailand and back to Mexico, I have observed one very great common need. (This world-wide need was not only to empower and encourage Americans to save money better.) It was a worldwide need for people from all countries to be able save more and invest more locally.

“How could so many people all over the world do so without local banking firms concerned with their local community?” I pondered.

I asked this because I had already observed whole sectors of US urban neighborhoods losing their local banks throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. In Chicago, for example, in and around Woodlawn where I once studied urban economics, there were several hundred thousand people without local bank.

Only one community bank existed in South Chicago by January 1983. This was the South Shore Bank where I did my practicum.

Moreover, continuing through the year 2000--from places as remote as Peru to Indonesia to Mexico to Egypt or India, I had observed many citizens from all-walks-of-life actually stuffing their pillow cases with dollar bills. (Many still do so to this to this very day—although some are also hiding their purchased gold, silver, and Euros.)

On the other hand, during my many travels, I had observed not only capital flight from poorer countries around the planet on and off during the boon and bust cycles of the most recent 4 decades, but I had observed the whispering of a common dream in many underdeveloped countries. This common dream was to one day actually be able to invest their one earnings and/or national currency in their own local economy. People of classes have similar desires.

“How could people be encouraged to save and invest where it was needed locally?” I asked myself.

In my homeland, we were only being encouraged to borrow and spend—even in the wake of 9-11.

BIG, BIGGER BIGGEST BANKS—WHAT A PLAN!??!

The only answer Wall Street and big banking conglomerates offered was to grow and demand more injections liquidity—often with investments coming from the farthest corners of the world to bailout the bad business practices and lack of long term planning and business development in the U.S.A.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S.A. federal government was headstrong on allowing banks to grow and take each other over.

After my college days in those same decades, my own local-bank-originated student loans were taken over by either Citibank or by Sallie Mae. There was no government oversight to keep my moneys in local Kansas—even though some of these same Kansas banks had assured me in advance that those loans would be held only locally.
No oversight! No responsibility to the local borrowing and lending industry affected Americans adversely and ran up costs in higher education for all Americans!

By around 1994, my sister and her husband had a combined college debt of a sum which would eventually reach to 100,000 dollars owed or paid to-date.

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