Wednesday, February 1, 2012

What Investors Can Learn From Occupy Wall Street

Forbes writes: The Occupy Wall Street movement may seem irrelevant to most investors but there is growing evidence it may be sparking a generational shift in the way Americans think about and manage their money.

Going local and going small is reversing three decades of failed experiments with giant shareholder-owned banks and insurance companies whose behavior has been driven by Wall Street rather than Main Street. In doing so, we are going back to the future, and about time, too.

The seminal event in this evolving trend was the “Move Your Money” project on November 5 to protest new fees that the too-big-to-fail banks such as Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C) were preparing to impose on depositors to compensate for lost revenue from new regulations limiting debit card interchange fees. The big banks need to satisfy the demands of their shareholders to produce quarterly profits that will support the stock price. That’s how they got themselves into trouble, by taking big risks seeking big profits and losing.

By urging people to move their cash out of big banks and put it into nonprofit, depositor-owned credit unions and in community banks, the Occupy movement, whether it realizes it or not, is teaching investors battered by the Great Recession a lesson their grandparents learned from the Great Depression—the key to building a nest egg is to avoid losing money as opposed to chasing returns. Benjamin Franklin had it right after all—a penny saved truly is a penny earned….

Read all about it at http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2012/01/31/what-investors-can-learn-from-occupy-wall-street/

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