I ran into this little tidbit on www.urbansurvival.com/blog
One of the main arguments that the US Consumer is not facing anything like the Great Depression is the “low” number of bank failure rates.
Up until today, I mostly agreed with that argument as in history class we learned that thousands and thousands banks failed during the Great Depression. That does not begin to compare with the paltry couple of hundred failed banks we have seen fail thus far.
UrbanSurvival offers this view: don’t take the bank HQ closing as one failure, but also take into consideration the corporate branches, the member client banks, and the ATM only branches. The official reports discount the effect of technology on the consumer with regard to the ease of getting money in and out.
During the ‘30s, the only option was to go to the physical bank to withdraw/deposit. Today, an ATM allows both those transactions while the physical branch bank can be hundreds of miles away.
It all boils down to the confidence of the consumer and the ease of which they can access their earned moneys.
Just a thought…from the Feral Capitalist
-- Lache
