The Country's Only Socialist Bank Thrives During Downturn

[Joanne98]

by Dale Wetzel

BISMARCK, N.D. - It has no automatic tellers or drive-up windows, doesn't issue credit cards, and tends only a few thousand checking and savings accounts. Its only location is a glass, steamboat-shaped headquarters near the Missouri River, where the business moved from its original 1919 home in a former auto assembly plant.

But now officials in other states are wondering if it is helping North Dakota sail through the national recession.

Gubernatorial candidates in Florida and Oregon and a Washington state legislator are advocating the creation of state-owned banks in those states. A report prepared for a Vermont House committee last month said the idea had "considerable merit." Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore promotes the bank on his Web site.

"There's a lot of hurt out there, a lot of states that are in trouble, and they're tying the Bank of North Dakota together with this economic success that we're having right now," said the bank's president, Eric Hardmeyer.

Hardmeyer says he's gotten "tons" of inquiries about the bank's workings, including questions from officials in California, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Washington state. North Dakota has the nation's lowest unemployment rate at 4.4 percent, soaring oil production and a robust state budget surplus - but Hardmeyer says the bank isn't responsible for the prosperity.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/16-3

[DeSwiss]

1. Cooperative banks are the only kind.....

...that make sense.

- Fractional lending is such crock that the only way it should be legal at all "is if the people own the lender."

K&R

[yurbud]

4. I still can't figure out how it's legal to lend money you don't have and never had

which means if you lend money at 0% interest, if you got paid back your profit would still be the amount of the loan minus administrative costs, so probably thousands of percent in profits. Interest just increases the amount they can get back that they never had to give in the first place.

[Vidar]

2. Nice to see the good guys winning out somewhere.

[yurbud]

3. kick

[Blue_Tires]

5. ttt