At his confirmation hearing in January 2017, Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin said,
"regulation is killing community banks."If the process is not reversed, he warned, we could "end up in a world where we have four big banks in this country." That would be bad for both jobs and the economy.
"I think that we all appreciate the engine of growth is with small and medium-sized businesses," said Mnuchin. "We're losing the ability for small and medium-sized banks to make good loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the community, where they understand those credit risks better than anybody else."
The number of US banks with assets under $100 million dropped from 13,000 in 1995 to under 1,900 in 2014. The regulatory burden imposed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act exacerbated this trend, with community banks losing market share at double the rate during the four years after 2010 as in the four years before. But the number had already dropped to only 2,625 in 2010. What happened between 1995 and 2010?
Comment: As usual, and under the guise of "security", legislation has been instated to screw the small business - and by extension, the average person, who just wants a fair deal without having to deal with a monolithic and criminal bank.