Political Analysis and Global Affairs

  America’s Banking Shake-Up: Why Community Banks Are Vanishing While Big Banks Grow Stronger You may not notice it when you walk into a branch, but America’s banking map is quietly shrinking. The small-town community bank—the kind where the loan officer knows your kids’ names—is slipping away. After the 2008 crash, there were about 7,000 of them. Now, we’re down to fewer than 4,000. That’s not just a statistic. That’s thousands of towns where people can’t walk across the street for a loan anymore. Meanwhile, the big beasts—JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup—keep swelling. They’re too large to topple, too politically painful to let fail. And everyone knows it. Which makes consolidation not just likely, but inevitable. Canada’s Different Story Here’s where it gets interesting. Compare this with Canada. They have only 79 banks in total. That’s it. And during the 2008 crisis, while American banks were collapsing like dominoes, the World Economic Forum declare...