New legislation calling on the USPS to begin offering banking services is a dangerous use of government resources.Not just payday lenders that are whining.
Add New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to the list of big name Democrats who want the U.S. Postal Service to double as a bank. The potential 2020 contender is rolling out legislation today that would require post offices to offer their customers basic financial services, such as checking and savings accounts and small, short-term loans, that many Americans currently can’t access affordably. While the idea of postal banking has been backed by progressives like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont—both likely presidential candidates—Gillibrand’s bill gives an important policy objective a high-profile, useful boost.Compare Girobank (UK).
By 2017, your neighbourhood post office will start operating as a bank. The Union Cabinet has cleared a proposal for setting up of the Indian Post Payment Bank, which will become operational from March next year.
"By March next year we will launch payments bank of the postal department. It's going to be a game changer. There are 1.54 lakh [154,000] post officers. And our network will be the largest in the world. Even bigger than State Bank of India," said Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Mr Prasad also said that during the discussions for deciding the modalities, 60 international consortiums had shown keen interest to partner India Post for third partner delivery for insurance and banking, among others.
"50 top names are here including Barclays and others. Talks are on and a huge matrix will be created," said Mr Prasad.
India Post has the largest network of core banking solutions branches in India. There has been a steady rise from 250-odd in 2014 to 22,000 at present.
The postal bank eyes to penetrate rural India via the postal department's 1.39 rural postal branches. In the first phase, 650 payment bank branches will be set up. Initially, the target was to create the architecture in three years but today at the cabinet meet, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the minister to finish work by September next year….The competition between India and China to dominate the global economy will be fierce — and interesting. They are approximately equal in population, but China is heavily wighted toward the aging and India toward the young, so India has a huge advantage demographically. Both countries are combine socialism and capitalism and will lead in forging a new "heterodox" system to replace the orthodoxy of neoliberalism as Western dominance declines. Presently, China's political system under market socialism with Chinese characteristics is much better organized than India's democratic but corrupt and some chaotic government apparatus, with different states taking widely different approaches. So presently China has the advantage in this regard.
At its June 20-23, 2014 annual meeting, the US Conference of Mayors (USCM) adopted a pair of resolutions endorsing postal banking, co-signed by eight mayors from six states. Their goal is to bring $1 trillion of job-creating economic stimulus primarily to low-income neighborhoods, over the next decade, at zero cost to taxpayers.…Web of Debt
A recent white paper by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General floated the idea of introducing postal banking services as a means of expanding financial inclusion. Not surprisingly, the banking industry has rushed to condemn the idea—which would create new competition for financial services—as sort of creeping socialism. But when one considers postal banking more carefully, the idea isn’t so crazy, although it raises a number of real questions and challenges.American Banker
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is the nation’s second largest civilian employer after WalMart. Although successfully self-funded throughout its long history, it is currently struggling to stay afloat. This is not, as sometimes asserted, because it has been made obsolete by the Internet. In fact the post office has gotten more business from Internet orders than it has lost to electronic email. What has pushed the USPS into insolvency is an oppressive 2006 congressional mandate that it prefund healthcare for its workers 75 years into the future. No other entity, public or private, has the burden of funding multiple generations of employees who have not yet even been born....
The Postal Service Modernization Bills brought by Peter DeFazio and Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, would allow the post office to recapitalize itself by diversifying its range of services to meet unmet public needs.
Needs that the post office might diversify into include (1) funding the rebuilding of our crumbling national infrastructure; (2) servicing the massive market of the “unbanked” and “underbanked” who lack access to basic banking services; and (3) providing a safe place to save our money, in the face of Wall Street’s new “bail in” policies for confiscating depositor funds. All these needs could be met at a stroke by some simple legislation authorizing the post office to revive the banking services it efficiently performed in the past.Web of Debt
