Are there other reasons that small banks have seemed to thrive in the United States but no where else?
That is 3.6 microbanks per person
The US has 9 microbanks per person, but based on the prediction of 1000 banks would be similar to Australia.
[1] https://www.ausbanking.org.au/insight/banking-by-numbers
SMITH: So states looked for ways to support and protect local banks.
SQUIRE: A lot of states passed what were called branch banking laws, which made it illegal to operate a bank out of more than one building. It's hard to imagine it now. And so every little town in America had its own local bank.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172957377/small-banks-are-de...
AFAIK we are also an outlier, but Germany has quite a few banks:
> As of December 2022, there were 1,389 credit institutions in [Germany]
-- https://www.statista.com/statistics/350502/eurozone-germany-...
edit:
US (FDIC insured only) 1 bank per 78,680 people, Germany 1 bank per 60,670 people (afaik every bank is essentially FDIC insured here), rough numbers from 2020-2023 wikipedia and statista.
There are another 737 Volksbanken & Raiffeisenbanken [1], which I think you would call credit unions in the US, and are owned by their members.
Both Sparkassen and Volksbanken have a complicated associated with bigger banks and service providers like asset managers (Landesbanken, DZ-Bank, LBS, Deutsche Leasing, Union Investment, etc.). It is just, that the number inflates, because of their upside-down ownership structure. The branches own the parents.
[0]: https://www.dsgv.de/sparkassen-finanzgruppe/organisation/ver...
It’s something even most Americans don’t even understand anymore, let alone foreigners or immigrants; that the USA is technically by design 50 countries, in an economic and organizational block for limited purposes.
The core, supreme law of the land, the Constitution is explicit that anything not explicitly delegated to the Federal government is the right of the state and the people. The vast majority of what the federal government claims rights over is not mentioned at all, let alone explicitly delegates to the federal government. Included in that, banks and regulation of banks.
Unfortunately, the founders of America were not positively explicit enough about the sovereignty of the states, probably because they had no understanding of the consolidating forces that would be introduced through things like automobiles, planes, roads, electricity, telecommunications, and computers and the internet.
The small banks thrived and why America’s banking sector was so “fragmented”, was by design, in hopes of preventing the very consolidation of power and control that the founders were so concerned about and threatens everything now. American banks were community scale, community oriented, community based, and had community accountability; all factors that restrain psychopathic tendencies of banks and bankers.
If these forces of evil that are trying to consolidate everything are not able to be stopped, by all measures things will only get worse for all of humanity from here. Just as banking has become stale and uniform and conformist without any real diversity, so will those pressures continue destroying real diversity in the world by trying to force everyone and everything into templated, repeatable objects for global uniformity.
There has been no time in human history where consolidation of power was a good thing. Monolithic things fail spectacularly. I would argue that the degree of global consolidation of power lusted after by globalists even represents an existential threat to humanity, if not all life on this planet. It creates a single point of failure and also snuffs out what makes us human, actual, real diversity of people doing different things in different places and environments, under the guise of fraudulent diversity and diversification.
What you are stating isn't that black and white. The US constitution is only worth as much as governments and judges are willing to enforce. And where it isn't very explicit, that's mostly a very political thing. In the case of banks means that a lot of power has actually been granted to federal authorities over time. All without changing a line of text in the constitution. There's been a bit of a cycle of de-regulation followed by crisis induced new regulations happening of course historically. And you might argue things are currently leaning towards more regulation rather than less given the apparent failure of the sector to self regulate and sort things out themselves.
But, IIRC, you can set up a bank absent checking services, wires, FDIC protection, etc. and operate entirely within one state. Good luck attracting customers.
The sovereignty of the states drastically changed after the civil war and the reconstruction amendments.
I won't get into debates about the Interstate Commerce Clause or anything like that. It's more fundamental. We're not the same country we were just out of the Articles of Confederation. If you lined up the 39 people who signed the document, or the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence and told them that after 250-odd years we were trying to live exactly to the standard they set without any progress or changes, they would consider the experiment failed.