There are some bankers that believe our industry would be better off politically with a single, unified voice. One does not have to venture any farther than the halls of Congress to dismiss that belief as a tired old myth.
Who, after all, wants to shackle their hands and ankles to the “too big to fail” banks and their unregulated affiliates and subsidiaries and jump off the 14th Street Bridge into the Potomac? But that’s precisely what some bankers and their trade associations would have you do; dismissing the efforts of the community banking lobby as nothing more than a “distraction” and chastising us for our divide and conquer mentality to protect our unique interests. They would go as far as making claims that a unified industry with a unified message is the only true way to move a political football.
Tell that to Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. In a recent Washington Post article describing how community banks are central to the current regulatory reform proposal, Chairman Frank describes the big bank lobby this way: “The larger financial institutions have the opposite of political clout today. They’re radioactive. The only way the big banks can win is if they get the community banks to be their troops.” And the Chairman is not unique in his views. Texas’ Congressional delegation understands it too. I know because I hear it in every office we visited in Washington this week and every time we make calls in the wake of this whole economic mess. “You guys are the good guys in the industry,” they tell us. “We would like to find a way to make sure we don’t disenfranchise the community banks as we debate this.”
The current Obama regulatory reform proposal is enough to scare the crap out of any of us. All we need is another regulator to get a broad legislative mandate to regulate products and services in the name of consumer protection, relegating us to “cookie cutter” and “plain vanilla” products and services. That proposal, courtesy of the unregulated “shadow” banking industry would translate into nothing more than socialized banking designed to eliminate customer convenience and choice while raising costs. That’s not how the greatest economic system in the world has evolved, nor how it will be strengthened in the future. You can bet if we can carve community banks out from under this Consumer Financial Protection Agency, we damn sure will do it.
So don’t tell us to get in line and leave the lobbying to groups that have divided interests and hope that somehow you will fairly represent the interests of community banks. We didn’t cause this mess and we are tired of helping the big banks clean it up in the form of higher regular and special FDIC assessments, suffocating new regulations and bad industry public relations.
We will continue speaking with one voice…a community banking voice.
