What to make of Occupy Wall Street

It certainly is not going to have much short term effect beyond a lot of media frenzy.   Wall Street regards it as a nuisance, nothing more.  Washington is locked in mortal combat over the next election, both sides afraid to do anything that might hurt their election chances.  In the longer term OWS may provide an emotional counterweight to the tea party on the right, a mixed blessing, since that will tend to pull Democrats out of the sensible center, even as it takes some steam out of the media fascination with the Tea Party.

The irony is OWS has the tools to make Wall Street sit up and take notice right now.  I would imagine a huge percentage of the OWS protestors, and the people who support them have bank accounts with Bank of America, Chase and the other big retail banks.

This country is full of little regional banks, who survived the 2008 crash because they are run by sensible management, they didn't get sucked into doing whatever stupid mortgage trick increased their bottom line a little bit.  If all those OWS protestors and supporters pulled their money out of the to-big-to-fail banks and moved to a regional bank, Wall Street would be scrambling all over to please OWS.

Of course the to-big-to-fail banks would then start trying to buy up the local regional banks to get their customers back, so  OWS should be working to turn the big bank brands into a liability, wherever the brand goes, OWS supporters go elsewhere.  If a big bank buys out a regional bank, dump that regional bank and move to a still independent bank.

We have two tools with which we can influence Wall Street.  Our votes are one, indirectly through the people we elect.  But the far stronger tool, in the short term, is our money.  We can all vote against Wall Street and the to-big-to-fail banks with your dollars by switching to bank with regional banks.