How fed up farmers started the only government-run bank in the US

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The idea of a state-run bank in the United States feels like a foreign concept. While public banks are fixtures of the financial system in countries like Canada and Chile, only one state in the U.S. can say they have a public bank. Today, we explore the promises and challenges of public banking in the U.S. and what advocates can learn from 20th-century farmers in North Dakota.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.1	This is the indicator for plenty of money.
0:13.6	I'm Adrienne Ma.
0:14.8	And I'm Waylon Wong.
0:15.9	When Melissa Marquez was growing up in California, her mom worked as a loan officer at a bank.
0:21.3	And she remembers the job being hard on her mom.
0:24.0	My mom worked in a poor community in San Diego because she spoke Spanish, where Mexican.
0:31.1	And she would come home at night and she would cry because people who she knew would be
0:37.2	good risks weren't being approved by the bank.
0:40.9	And my mom never cried.
0:43.2	So I was really impacted by that experience of wondering what would be so horrible that
0:49.8	my mom would cry over it.
0:51.9	Melissa was motivated to go into banking so that she could help the kinds of customers
0:56.2	that were turned away by the bank where her mom worked.
0:59.2	Today, Melissa is CEO of Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union in Rochester, New York.
1:04.6	But after 25 years of working in the banking sector, Melissa has a vision for a different
1:08.9	kind of bank in her city.
1:10.8	She wants to create a public bank.
1:12.8	That's a bank that's owned by the government.
1:14.5	And in places like New York State and California, advocates like Melissa are pushing for this government
1:20.5	run option.
1:21.5	Today in the show, we explore the promise and challenges of public banking in the U.S.
	...

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