I'm throwing this in here because I know for some of you "investing" is a trigger word, practiced in that greatest den of iniquity, The Stock Market. At best, you think it's a casino, at worst, you think it is ravaging the earth, and in either case, rigged to benefit the 1% at the expense of the other 99%. You are surprised that someone who claims to value humanity, biodiversity, who believes scientific evidence about climate change, who is passionate about affordable housing, is celebrating investing and has chosen it as a vehicle for personal development and social change.
Gamestop became world-famous during the pandemic due to a coordinated buying rally on the subreddit [/r/WallStreetBets], presumably as a short squeeze against large institutional investors but also manifesting the Ponzi scheme that has the potential to be embedded in any group investment activity. It was the first of the meme stocks, to be followed by the movie theater chain AMC, the nostalgic food storage containers by Tupperware, and more. They are highly unstable and not generally regarded as reflecting reality: used video game cartridges did not suddenly become a successful industry just because the stock price increased 900% in one year. However, memes can have a seed of truth.
A lesser known of meme stocks are those when investors confuse names or companies. After Elon Musk tweeted in January 2021 recommending his followers "use Signal" the encrypted text messaging service, the stock for the company Signal Advance went up 438$ instead. Perhaps it is just Elon's reality distortion field, but there are probably investors who buy shares of Tesla thinking they are investing in SpaceX, The Boring Company, or any of Elon's other companies, because he is the CEO of all of them.
In the same way, banks and investors are often vilified in movies and popular media. Scrooge is a cold-hearted moneylender in Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The evil banker in It's a Wonderful Life is threatening to foreclose on a bunch of orphans. And there are plenty of examples of banks behaving badly in real life. Wells Fargo was embroiled in a scandal where employees created fake customer accounts in order to collect bonuses. Their largest shareholder in the past, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, while declining to criticize Wells Fargo and its CEO directly, is now largely divested from the company. All major banks during the Global Financial Crisis accepted a government bailout of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, with top executives still collecting large bonuses, at a time when many ordinary citizens were suffering layoffs.
However, just as small businesses add 2/3 of all new jobs in the last 25 years (https://advocacy.sba.gov/2022/04/26/small-business-facts-small-business-job-creation/), the majority of bank deposits are held at regional or small banks, other than the big 7 () (https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/largest-banks-us-list/) JPMorgan Chase – $3.31 Trillion. Bank of America – $2.41 Trillion. Citigroup – $1.714 Trillion. Wells Fargo & Co. – $1.712 Trillion. U.S. Bancorp – $591.21 Billion. PNC Financial Services – $553.39 Billion. Truist Financial Corporation – $534.19 Billion. Goldman Sachs – $513.91 Billion.
Some regional banks, either through risky behavior and bad accounting, insufficient superivision from the government, modern technology and the same flighty social coordination allowing flash withdrawals, suffered collapse in March 2023, notably Silicon Valley Bank, where all the above factors were in play, and later First Republic.
However, there are many regional banks that lend to local businesses and make the determination every day of worthwhile credit risks to grow local communities, fund new buildings and infrastructure, and providing both physical safety and security to citizens who previously put their cash under their mattresses.
The Bank of America started as a bank for Italian Americans in California during the 1920s, when they were discriminated against by other banks. It was brought into being by the sheer energy and skill of mostly one man, Giannini, and his community and family in San Francisco, and was instrumental in rebuilding that community after a great fire. Due to their focus on keeping large reserves, customer service, and serving the community, The "Bank of Italy" has grown into the BoA of today.
No business grows large and stays large for long periods of time without serving more people than most of its competitors. The Enrons, the Long Term Capital Managements, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, the Bernie Madoffs and Jeffrey Epsteins, all fall eventually, and usually only last as long as they do through willful ignorance of their contemporaries. As in any organization, there is waste, corruption, people behaving badly, but very few are unalloyed Camelots, shining cities on a hill without blemish (Berkshire Hathaway comes to mind as the closest modern example, and there are many anti-capitalists who will find its inevitable faults as well). To dismiss wholesale an entire industry for the faults of their worst exemplars, picked cursorily from sensationalist headlines, without acknowledging the good they also do, and oftentimes in vast preponderance in proportion to their ills, is, as Charlie Munger put it, "the height of immaturity."
Vicky Hollub is not your typical oil executive. She knows that oil production is an industry that contributes the most to carbon emissions and climate change, and she knows its time will come to an end, and is actively working .