Current Affairs

Terri Friedline is an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She's also a contributor to Current Affairs, where she published one of our most unusual pieces ever: a piece of speculative utopian fiction about the end of Wells Fargo. Terri is also the author of the excellent book Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System. Today, Terri joins to explain why Wells Fargo is so pernicious that she wrote a story imagining its obliteration. She explains how ordinary people are hurt by a financial system that concentrates so much power in a few giant mega-banks, and what the practical alternative to a world of Wells Fargos and JP Morgan Chases is. We talk about public banking projects and their prospects. We also talk about the way that "financial literacy education" perniciously tries to get people to accept responsibility for personal financial difficulties that are the result of systemic injustices, and what liberatory financial education (of the kind Fri