Blog Power! White House on board with Huffington’s ‘Move Your Money’

At the end of last year, Arianna Huffington and friends urged Americans to make moving their money to small, community banks a New Year’s resolution. Now, it appears that resolution has been televised, as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made a similar recommendation at yesterday’s White House briefing. This is a big win for blogs, but what about those poor, too-big-to-fail banks?

Here are Gibbs’ remarks, followed by a fuller transcript:

Transcript:

Q And on the bank fees, the President expressed outrage today about the resurgence of Wall Street bonuses. How can the administration practically get these banks to roll back bonuses or hold down on them, and to use that money to repay the bailout funds as he suggested?

MR. GIBBS: Well, the second part I don’t —

Q Well, he said that they should roll back their bonuses, then use that money to pay the bailout funds, instead of passing it on to the customers.

MR. GIBBS: Well, let me go through — there’s a number of different questions. First and foremost, the President discussed today his proposal for a financial crisis responsibility fee. You’ve heard the President before discuss ensuring that taxpayers that acted quickly to deal with, quite frankly, the wreckage left by excessive risk-taking and its threat to our financial and economic system, that those taxpayers deserve to be made whole and paid back for the money that was lent to financial institutions that have caused all this damage.

We think it’s structured in a way that is reasonable. It is a little hard hearing some of the criticism coming from banks about what the President has proposed, based on the fact that the taxpayers have so generously lent their money at a time in which exponentially more money has been set aside for bonuses and compensation, because they think the good times are back. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t make any sense to the President. And I can’t imagine it makes any sense to anybody watching in America to believe that somehow somebody that sets aside exponentially more for bonuses is going to take — is going to pass this fee on to their customers.

Now, if they do, they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, and I think Americans will look at one of the 8,000 or 9,000 banks in this country that acted responsibly and move their money there. Americans have a choice in where they bank.

Again, I don’t — I think it strains your credibility to somehow believe or even make the case that this is something you have to pass on to your customers if you’re setting aside somewhere on the order of 10 times that amount of money just to pay out bonuses.

This is a responsible way to ensure that the law is upheld and that taxpayers are paid back in full for the money that they lent to stabilize our financial system.

Q But if the marketplace does not — fails to discipline these banks and prevent them from passing on the costs of these fees to their customers, are there any legislative measures that the administration would contemplate?

MR. GIBBS: Certainly I’ll talk to the economic team, but it’s a little play off that old slogan — I think you can let your money do the talking. You just — if your bank has decided that as a way of repaying your generosity in papering over their excessive risk-taking that almost crashed this economy into something as deep as the Great Depression, if their great reward to you is to pass the bar tab for their wreckage on to you, I would suggest to anybody that is at a bank like that to move it to any number of small and community banks throughout this country that somehow got by all these years playing by the rules.

If you like Gibbs’ idea, there’s an entire “Move your money” website devoted to the plan, complete with this video that analogizes the whole thing to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Sure, it’s a bit manipulative, but so are big banks. Overall, I agree, but I have a slight problem with being compared to Uncle Billy. I’ve watched that movie dozens of times, and I want to strangle that dumbass every time.

Gibbs has a pretty sure winner here, as conservative outrage that Americans would actually have to change banks,  and the 10 minutes and zero dollars that entails, is pretty feeble.

As for Arianna and co., having your plan endorsed by the White House is a gargantuan feather in the cap.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.