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About the author: Karney Hatch is a filmmaker whose new documentary, Overdrawn!, explores the predatory lending practices of major national banks with Ralph Nader, Joel Bakan, a loan shark, and many others.
In all the number crunching and legalese surrounding predatory fees of various sorts, it’s easy to forget the visceral reaction that they cause in people. Ask any “telephone banker” who works a call center for any of the big banks, and they’ll tell you the first reaction that these fees cause in customers: rage.
Or, sometimes, shame. Which is the way the banks want it. For the most part, only people with low balances in their accounts get overdrawn, and so one of the most common emotional reactions when the fees hit is shame, and people who are ashamed don’t tell their friends they got overdrawn, they don’t call their member of Congress and tell them something needs to be done, they don’t switch to a smaller local bank or a credit union -– they just pay the fees and go back to their lives. Until the next time they get overdrawn, and then the process repeats.
I have two things that I want to encourage people to do.
Don’t feel ashamed. Shame just makes us feel isolated and powerless. Rage is healthier and leads to actions, like those mentioned above.
I’d like to encourage people to consider an option that hasn’t quite hit the mainstream yet, at least here in the US: microlending. A relative of credit unions, sites like Lending Club and Kiva work by facilitating loans between individuals, but without any kind of bureaucracy that can lead even a well-meaning credit union in the wrong direction. No middle man, no managers, no shareholders watching the bottom line. Just people lending to people.
For now the micro- prefix fits, but there’s no reason that this framework can’t expand into home mortgages, business loans, and so on; in short, every form of lending that banks currently dominate and exploit. As Jessica Anderson, a banking consultant with over three decades in the industry, says in Overdrawn!, “Once that model gets the bugs worked out, then why do we need banks?” And how would that make me feel? Pretty damn good, I have to say.
If you enjoyed this article, please take a look at Overdrawn! The Documentary by Karney Hatch.
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