U.S. retail banks steal ~$8B from American consumers every 3 months in the form of overdraft charges and fees (source, Moebs: https://breckyunits.com/the-great-bank-robbery.html).
If FTX is a scam, throw the book at SBF, sure. But crypto is the only hope I see for American consumers to stop getting scammed.
(note that you don't pay overdraft fees unless you have an overdraft, and crypto does not permit overdrafts at all ..)
European snark: Because "muh freedumb!!!" should also apply to businesses because businesses are people, Citizens United has proven that.
Reality: because consumer protection laws can cost businesses quite a lot of profit, so they do everything they can to lobby for lax consumer protection. An entire party's ideology boils down to a "lean government" model where the government only does the bare minimum to keep the lights running and private companies do everything else.
> If the banks are so universally unpopular, and provide such terrible service, how is this not a political issue?
It is, but banks have completely bought off Congress by donations.
> note that you don't pay overdraft fees unless you have an overdraft
Banks have been accused of manipulating the order of account credit and debit transactions to artificially generate overdraft fees for over a decade [1][2], and Wells Fargo was embroiled in many years of court battles to keep that cash cow alive [3].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/02/22/are-b...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/06/11/yes-b...
[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/wells-fargo-could-take-overdr...
Why would crypto?
That’s a smart way to put it. Also explains why I saw FTX marketed so much more heavily than Coinbase.