Capitalism for All?

For all the failures of bankers and policy-makers to tame the unbridled innovations of capitalism in recent years, many of us have also lost our own way financially -- and it's costing us hugely. American consumers are needlessly losing hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary banking and checking fees, inflated interest rates, and missed opportunities. Reclaiming those dollars and putting them to work for workers is one of the most powerful, and widely overlooked, opportunities we have to restart economic mobility in the U.S.

For a half-century we've benefited from the democratization of the financial services industry -- and all of the new ways of saving, spending, borrowing, and investing that it created. Up until just 60 years ago, most American's either kept their money under a mattress or just had a checking or savings account at their local bank. Capitalism was simple, in other words. But, during the second half of the 20th century, financial services were broadly expanded for all. In the 1950s, for instance, credit cards didn't exist, 14 percent of us had access to the stock market, and 59 percent had a checking account. Today, by contrast, there are 640 million credit cards in circulation -- nearly three for every adult -- and we owe nearly $1 trillion. Similarly, over 60 percent of us are directly invested in the stock market and over 90 percent have a checking account.

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