Yesterday, I joined the California Reinvestment Coalition, ACCE (formerly California ACORN) and other consumer advocates to deliver 15,000+ petition signatures to the Federal Reserve office in San Francisco with one demand: Stop these bank mergers.
OneWest Bank and CIT Bank have troubled histories of foreclosures and squandered public bailouts. If the Federal Reserve approves the merger, they would become “too big to fail”—which is precisely why stopping it could be a game-changer.
We also delivered a letter to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, signed by 51 state and national organizations, calling for hearings on the proposed merger of CIT Group and OneWest Bank.
Besides our landing page, Daily Kos collected petition signatures on our MoveOn page and via Facebook—bringing our combined total to 15,559 signatures.
According to advocates, the Federal Reserve rarely gets feedback from these bank mergers—and they are almost universally approved. Which means that this was arguably the most protested bank merger in history.
If we can stop the merger of two (comparatively) small banks whose combined assets are over $50 billion—which bank regulators consider “too big to fail”—it could be a game changer in how the Federal Reserve treats these institutions.
The Federal Reserve should look out for Main Street not Wall Street, and denying this merger could be the first step.
Click here for more information about the merger by the California Reinvestment Coalition.