
Building an ethical bank in Britain - Mz
http://www.businessinsider.com/triodos-uk-md-bevis-watts-on-building-an-ethical-bank-in-age-of-trump-and-brexit-2017-4
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tommoor
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…

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

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

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mncharity
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.

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rahimnathwani
"... 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.

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hd4
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.

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dnautics
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.

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

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yuhong
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.

