Starting with the forced merger of Bear Stearns into JPMorgan Chase in 2008 and the failure of Lehman Brothers in the same year, Congress, regulators and the public at large have been questioning our banking policy of “Too Big to Fail.”
The passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) at the end of the George W. Bush Administration has been widely criticized as corporate welfare and a “bailout” for rich, selfserving bankers.
What we in Hilton Head Island and Bluffton should be concerned with is, do we have the national will to let our community banks thrive? Money center banking (a large bank in a major financial center which borrows from and lends to governments, corporations and other banks) is important to the world economy and local banking is critical to small businesses in our market.