Building an ethical bank in Britain | Hacker News Reader

Building an ethical bank in Britain

businessinsider.com

32 pointsMz9 comments

If there was a modern, truly ethical bank in the US I'd be signing up in minutes. It's a great differentiator in a sea of corruption and morally apprehensible investments…

I was actually thinking of checking out a few local credit unions. Maybe that will work?

Credit Unions work for their members. My experiences are constantly positive, and the complete opposite of banks.

Yes and no. An FCU I'll leave nameless, has for years been selling their member mailing list to "partners"... some of whom then send mail that tries very hard to look like official FCU correspondence outlining benefits, and is actually an otherwise unaffiliated life insurance sales exercise. A sign-up scam. The FCU has been ok with this for several decades now.

"... Triodos is unusual in that it ... lends out less than the total of customer deposits entrusted to it, subverting the fractional reserve model."

What? That's pretty much the definition of fractional reserve banking. You accept $N of deposits from customers. You lend $0.9N. You don't have enough liquid assets (e.g. cash) to pay pack all depositors in the event of a bank run.

I totally agree with you, but the counter-argument will then always be "what incentive does the bank then have to operate?".

For this reason, I believe the idea of a bank as a business or an entity that is operated privately without the implicit requirement to operate ethically and on behalf of a state's citizens, needs to be completely done away with otherwise we will inevitably end up in the current sociopolitical mess we have now.

It's impossible to build an environmentally ethical bank on top of an inflationary economic system - the very nature of the money in such a system encourages individuals to consume.

It's great to see something like this because ethical banking is definitely necessary if we want a future that is desirable.

I think the biggest problem is the way the economy "booms" based on credit, which led to things like derivatives to take advantage of them. Housing is a good example here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com