North Dakota is the only state so far that has established a publicly owned bank.   Founded in 1919, the Bank of North Dakota has a mission to "promote agriculture, commerce, and industry" and "be helpful to and assist in the development of… financial institutions… within the State."  BND functions primarily as a "banker's bank," providing loan participation and other support to local banks. Thanks in large part to BND, community banks are much more robust in North Dakota than in other states.  North Dakota has 35 percent more banks per capita than South Dakota, and four times as many as the national average (see our graph).  While locally owned small and mid-sized banks (under $10 billion in assets) account for only 30 percent of deposits nationally, in North Dakota they have 72 percent of the market. More

A growing number of states and cities are considering legislation that would move government bank accounts to small community banks and credit unions. More

Under Glass-Steagall, commercial banks (those that accept deposits) were prohibited from engaging in most investment banking activities, including underwriting and selling securities, and from affiliating with investment banks and other companies "engaged principally" in the trading of securities. Likewise, investment banks were barred from accepting deposits. More

The delinking of money from place and productive investment is not the inevitable result of technological advances or economic evolution. Money is a human invention and rules that control its dynamic are also a human invention. To slow down the speculative and destablizing flow of money, John Maynard Keynes proposed a small financial transaactions tax in 1930. More

Credit unions are not-for-profit, tax-exempt financial institutions that are cooperatively owned by their depositors. The United States is home to 7,600 credit unions, which collectively hold 10 percent of domestic deposits and have more than 90 million members (as of April 2010). More

In 1994, Congress adopted a policy that bars a bank from buying another bank if the combined entity would hold more than 10 percent of the country's deposits.  The cap has several flaws, including loopholes  that allowed both Bank of America and Wells Fargo, with the approval of the Federal Reserve, to expand beyond the cap when they acquired failing institutions in 2008 and 2009.  Many people are calling for reinstating a cap on bank size that would limit a bank's liabilities to no more than 3 or 4 percent of U.S. GDP. More

Like community-owned sports teams, cooperatives and employee stock ownership plans are organizational models that tend to root businesses in their communities. Both ESOPs and coops are powerful tools that give decision making authority to those who will feel the impact of the decisions they make. When authority and responsibility are linked, decisions will likely be made in the best interests of the local community. More

Surcharges are the fees banks charge noncustomers for use of their ATMs. Surcharges are deducted directly from the consumer's account at the time of the transaction. (When you withdraw $20 and your receipt says $21.50, you have paid a $1.50 surcharge to the bank that owns the ATM.) Surcharging first began in 1996. Today, 93 percent of all banks surcharge noncustomers an average of $1.37 for each ATM transaction. Americans paid an estimated $2.2 billion in surcharges in 2001. More

In the early 1980s, high unemployment and the rapid exodus of capital from Quebec led the province to offer seed capital and tax incentives for a new kind of venture capital fund that provided equity to small and medium-sized businesses. The Solidarity Fund was created in 1983 and controlled by the Quebec Federation of Labor. In 1988, the federal government enacted its own tax credit for labor sponsored investment funds(LSIFs), using the Solidarity Fund as a model. Since then about 25 such funds have been created: two national and the rest provincial. More than 400,000 Canadians are shareholders in the funds, which generate $500-$700 million a year, equivalent on a per capita basis to $5-$7 billion in the United States. More

Community Reinvestment encourages banks to lend to borrowers in all segments of the community.