Fighting Inflation: Don’t Trust Banks to Have Your Back

Available for Interviews: Harry Abrahamsen

Harry J. Abrahamsen is Founder & CEO Abrahamsen Financial Group. His company offers customized wealth management solutions—creating plans and portfolios that protect, preserve, and grow clients’ wealth. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Money Rule$: It’s Not What You Make, It’s What You Keep.

What Harry Abramhamsen can say in an interview on
The Banking Industry’s Role in Wealth Growing:

As we deal with record-high inflation, unrest around the world, and an economy that has been thrown into turmoil by the pandemic, some may wonder about history repeating itself. Could we have another Great Depression? Should we trust banks to have our back?

• • The banking system is an immense tide that is being held back by a series of weak barriers and bailouts. 
  • Your bank is not a safe space. In 1933, Americans were in the throes of the Great Depression, suffering from the wake of the stock market crash and the resulting nationwide commercial bank failures. (9,000 banks failed between 1930 and 1933; 4,000 of them in 1933 alone.)

The Glass-Stengall Act and
Its Impact on Your Money Today

• • In response to this banking disaster, Virginia Senator Carter Glass and Alabama Representative Henry Steagall introduced the Glass-Steagall Act to divide investment and commercial banking activities into different institutions—e.g. to keep Wall Street separate from Main Street. Until this point, most banking institutions were taking the role of the investment bank, commercial bank, and insurance company all in one, and they were able to participate in the practice of tying commercial bank loans to the market, which became disastrous for the people when the stock market crashed.
  • The Act ensured that commercial bank credit (the money of the people) would not be connected to the stock market, and therefore never again grenaded by a stock market crash. This much-disputed landmark banking legislation was a win for the people, providing individuals with more security for the money they entrusted to their banks. But soon enough, lenient regulatory interpretations and loopholes chipped away at the protections and watered down restrictions.
  • In 2008, the Great Recession exposed this gaping chasm between the banking institutions’ interests and the people they supposedly served. Banks were blatantly leveraging their clients’ dollars for their own schemes, and people became brutally aware that banks were playing for keeps at the expense of their lives.
  • The bank’s strategy is to get you to deposit your money not just once, but as often as possible, and they want to hold onto it for as long as possible and to give you back as little as possible when you want it because they build their wealth by moving money around (through the velocity of the money multiplier). You put money in, they lend it out over and over again with mortgages, credit cards, personal loans, and student loans—so much so that there is a federal reserve requirement stating that banks and other depository institutions must hold 10% of the amount of all deposits to back up a percentage of the money in your account with an actual reserve.

Banks are like the house in Las Vegas. They always win.  If you want your money to GROW, you need a financial advisor to help you spread it out into other investments that will actually make you money.
–Harry Abrahamsen