GEORGE BAILEY, CALL YOUR OFFICE

1/31/09

The Wall Street Journal reports today that many banks, leery of the restrictions about which the big banks who took the government’s money are now whining, have said “No, thank you” to TARP money.

These refusenik banks are, for the most part, not surprisingly, not located in the financial canyons of New York or Chicago. Instead, the include such banks as United Bankshares, Inc., of Charleston, West Virginia, American River Bankshares of Sacramento, California, and Rurban Financial Corp. in Defiance Ohio. Apparently the people who run these banks realize that when one takes the man’s money, one does what the man says and wanted no part of the man, even if the man is Senator Claire McCaskill. (See one of today’s other posts, “SHE ASKS ME WHAT I MAKE…”)

This characteristic bout of good sense and prudence emanating from America’s smaller financial institutions provides further evidence for my long held contention that, if we are ever to emerge from this financial morass, it will be the good sense of the small business person, not the bloviations of the blowhards in New York and Washington, that will lead us to safety.

It would be nice if Mr. Obama or the pooh-bahs on Wall Street would consider hiring some of the people who run such institutions to help solve some of these problems, or at least listening to what they have to say. Such a development, however, is probably impossible. People who run small banks, for the most part, want no part of the hypocrisy, group think, supercilious vanity, and utter insanity that characterizes our nation’s political and economic power centers.