Today Occupy Wall Street Became a Real Threat to Global Banking

It's all fun and games until a protest movement goes global.

That's exactly what happened today as the Occupy Wall Street shindig suddenly and unofficially spread to 1,500 cities worldwide, including more than 100 in the US. Officially, OWS, as the protesters call it, has become a threat to mainstream banking. This from several hundred people camped out in a concrete park near the southern tip of Manhattan.

To call this a media protest is a wild understatement. Take a minute and look at the streaming video of recent OWS protests, and you'll see camera after camera snapping and video-ing away as the New York Police Department struggles to not look like bungling fools. (Can you blame them? The NYPD hasn't had practice for something like this since the Vietnam War.) The cameras are everything. They are the ignition fluid for this wildfire.

In just one month the movement has gone viral (see web traffic graphic below). Occupy clearly speaks to a wide breadth of consumers. The messages that banks are "evil" and "We are the 99%" resonate. When you couple them with The New York Times' article on Oct. 16 on how banks keep consumers "hooked" on fees via online banking, the time is fast approaching when the "99%" will try to take the bankers from among the "1%" out to the woodshed for an old-fashion whoopin'.

In turn, OWS might look for banking alternatives to promote, although there are few. This is the essence of the problem with OWS: there are no alternative plans in the protests, just more protests. Sure, someone might step up and make a coherent case for instituting more restraints on bank sizes and asset concentrations, but until that time, it is more likely that these Occupy protests will turn increasingly violent, and specifically toward banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.

When these massive banks post multiple billions of dollars of profits each quarter, as Citi and JPM have done over the last few days, it is hard to imagine the major US banks facing an existential threat from OWS. However, Occupy is simply not good for business. Which will simply continue to feed the Occupy movement. I hear the Occupy protests in Seattle today made an utter mess of the morning commute. As they say, from sea to shining sea.

Tags: Chase, Citibank, Citigroup, JPM, JPMorgan Chase, OWS, Occupy, protests

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Comment by Jerry Ashton on October 18, 2011 at 5:12pm: As a mostly silent but long-term member of Bank Innovation, I was wondering how long it would take for someone to notice exactly how REAL a (deserved) threat this movement is to banking. Couldn't happen to a nicer industry, BTW.

Having been involved and reporting on this phenomenon early on, I can vouch that it is very, very real. Here is one blog and one interview to chew on:

http://writtenoffamerica.com/occupy-wall-street/

http://wgrnradio.com/blog/2011/10/11/special-voices-of-the-wall-str...

Oh yes, and a bit of history that led us to all this - those F***G Hippies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKEZoY-TMG4

Write me your thoughts: writtenoffusa@gmail.com. @WrittenOffUSA on Twitter

Comment by Frank Rauscher on October 18, 2011 at 5:15pm: All those cheers from Wall Street when the Glass-Steagall Wall was torn down may not be enough to drown out the OWS jeers. Irrespective of your opinion as to who is the real leader of OWS (which ranges from progressive secular paid protesters to free speech advocates,college students having fun,etc and up to real middle Americans that have been snookered out of assets, jobs, and their American Dream) the banking industry is appearing to be incompetent in their PR or they cannot make a case to justify their position. And they are not capable or not willing to involve Washington in the role that government played (whether bought and paid for by the bank industry lobbyists or ideological passion by a small cadre of House and Senate banking committee leaders).

Banking de-regulation appears to many in the OWS crowd as a total failure and someone in banking needs to make a case why the mega-banks broke their promises to to the masses to justify their mergers and how the country is better off as a result. If they cannot do that, then they need to pray for a very cold winter and that lightening somehow strikes and destroys the Teddy Roosevelt face at Mt. Rushmore in the event that someone gets the idea to breakup the big banks like Teddy did when he had his Trust Busting shoes on.

Comment by JJ Hornblass on October 18, 2011 at 5:28pm: I'm in full agreement with you, Frank.

Comment by Jeffry Pilcher on October 20, 2011 at 2:08pm: The live stream perfectly captures the mess of incoherence in this movement. It seems that OWS is as obsessed with itself and its relationship with police as it is with [insert protest theme here]. Protests usually have clear aims, stated goals, desired outcomes. Unless this group can articulate its demands beyond "we want financial justice," they are doomed to fail.

Comment by Jerry Ashton on October 20, 2011 at 2:20pm: The put-down's, untruths (talking points picked up on Fox? Limbaugh? tparty meetings?) and discounts are running rampant, I see. TY4Sharing, Mr. Pilcher. Anything to discredit a truly historic and American moment.

Doomed to fail? "Mess of Incoherence?" What you are seeing is the messy nature of Democracy. If it took a year between the first Continental Congress til the 2nd in 1775 before the Declaration of Independence was finally put to paper, I think we can allow these "kids" a bit more time.

Now, please honor me and others in this thread by actually listening to the voices of these people in the link i have attached.

Comment by Chris Duncan on October 21, 2011 at 10:22am: No Twitter, Facebook, et al in 1775. No news shows in 1775. No unions. No unemployment, Soc. Sec, etc. No Megabanks, iPhones, iPads. No entitlements. You worked for what you had. No free trade. You exchanged and bought goods with local folks. Most politicians actually made incredible sacrifices. How did they ever get it done?!?

Gov't regulations won't fix our problems. Only we can. If we want to send the over paid CEOs a message, we should stop buying and using their products. We need to realize a lot of pain will come from that. Because the first people to go will be the ones who actually do the work (BofA is letting go 30,000 people). Those people should band together and scrape everything they have and start their own companies that do it better.

Instead of Mr. Buffet giving billions to companies that are part of the problem (BofA) he should make investments in the above started companies.

If OWS really wanted to make a difference they would organize a few companies to be different. Use the profits from those to start a few more. They would take their own capital and risk it all, to make a better working US. They should say no more bail-outs. They should demand justice from those who got us here, but also demand justice from themselves. Because really, (sorry for the cliche), we are the enemy.

Both parties have more money then most of us can even imagine. One wants to take more from everyone and continue the entitlements instead of using their own to build a better system. The other says they believe in free enterprise, capitalism, and that people can do it better on their own, but yet they don't rein in their own greed.

Only, "We" the people can turn things around.

Comment by Jeffry Pilcher on October 21, 2011 at 10:37am: Wow… Now who's getting personal??? For the record, I don't watch FOX, don't listen to Limbaugh, and can't stand the radical right. Believe it or not, the opinions I have are ones I've formed on my own.

I viewed the video yesterday, and all I saw was a bunch of shots of cops shoving and people yelling. I heard people chant stuff like "Get that animal off that horse." There were three instances in the video where the camera and crowd both relished in the celebrity of mass media attention — "Oooh, there we are up on the Times Square ticker."

As noble as you think your aims are (likening yourself to this country's founding fathers!) the video did an extremely poor job communicating anything to anyone outside the OWS movement. I watched 10 minutes and didn't hear "the voice of people." It was more like random b-roll. Where's the meat? What's the message? Why don't you rewatch your own video, and this time try to see it through the eyes of a curious American instead of a pissed-off protestor? As surprising as you may find this, I am very sympathetic to many of the things that upset OWS protesters, but do those things come across in this video? No, they don't.

Neither the video nor the mountain of attitude you flipped me had a positive influence on my impressions of OWS. And thus my interest in this subject and this conversation have reached its conclusion.

Good luck.

Comment by Scott J McKim on October 21, 2011 at 10:46am: Come on, Jerry! It is hardly rational to compare the timeline of OWS with that of the first Continental Congress to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I don't think the founding fathers had the benefit of camera phones and Twitter, which may be why it took a year.

You may have a point that OWS is a spark of revolution against the establishment. However any success the movement may have is dependent upon consolidated voices and, to quote Jeffry, to "articulate its demands." These people are pissed because their perception is that bankers are raking in cash while they are unemployed, disillusioned, or have nowhere else to turn (let's face it the government is not helping and I might argue they are making it worse). In their minds being a banker is a crime. I think banks in general have been made the scapegoat for the poor economic conditions around the world and the media continues to foster that notion. In fact it is much larger and much more complicated. There are hundreds of respectable institutions in this country which are being grouped together with big name banks as the evils of society who manipulate things purely for profit.

Banks are not directly responding because there is nothing clear to respond to. By doing nothing, we appear ignorant. Classic catch-22. How should bank's react is the question. I don't know the answer. If Jamie Dimon were to walk into the OWS camp on Wall Street with the intent of having a rational, productive conversation (assuming he has that capacity), what would happen? Do we start with too big to fail? Maybe that means something is just too big and that should change. Was TARP a mistake? If so, why not occupy the steps at GM's & Chrysler's headquarters--they are profitable now and made it on the back of taxpayers--at the expense of bondholders and shareholders who happen to be on Wall Street. At least the banks have paid back TARP with a healthy profit to the taxpayer.

Comment by Matt Cropp on November 9, 2011 at 11:23am: One thing missing from this article is the synergy between OWS and Bank Transfer Day, which signals the possibility for an alliance between the Occupy Movement and the credit union movement. If such an alliance goes past the flirting phase and becomes firm, it could lead to some interesting times ahead. See: http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/bank-transfer-day-populism-an...

Comment by JJ Hornblass on November 9, 2011 at 2:10pm: The number of consumers switching to credit unions remains smalls, despite all the hoopla. Even the 650,000 switches to date won't matter much to the nation's major banks, each of which count tens of millions of consumers in their retail customer bases.

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