@andy58-in-nh
And WHO controls the "member banks" that have the authority and the courts of the US Government to back them up and protect them and their monopoly?
Good question.
Banks are regulated and controlled at the Federal government level by the following:
- The Federal Reserve Board
- The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- The Securities and Exchange Commission
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
So, while they are nominally "private entities", American banks operate under a strict regime of regulatory oversight, the statutes for which run to tens of thousands of pages. This works both for and
against the consumer, who is protected from abuse in certain respects, but also subject to limited choices among products and services, and exposed to the results of influence-peddling and collusion of the sort that naturally occurs in any public-private "partnership".
As in so many other areas of governmental oversight, passing more laws won't solve the problems that exist within the current regime. Greater freedom of choice, fewer complex and contradictory laws, and operational transparency as a requirement of the laws that do exist - all of these stand a better of chance of preventing collusion and monopoly than what we now have in place.