The People’s Bank

Abby Rapoport

How did deep-red North Dakota end up with the nation’s most populist financial institution?

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, nearly every state legislature was left contending with massive revenue shortfalls. Every state legislature, that is, except North Dakota’s. In 2009, while other states were slashing budgets, North Dakota enjoyed its largest surplus. All through the Great Recession, as credit dried up and middle-class Americans lost their homes, the conservative, rural state chugged along with a low foreclosure rate and abundant credit for entrepreneurs looking for loans.

Normally one of the overlooked states in flyover country, North Dakota now had the country’s attention. So did an unlikely institution partly responsible for its fiscal health: the Bank of North Dakota. Founded in 1919 by populist farmers who’d gotten tired of big banks and grain companies shortchanging them, the only state-owned bank in America has long supported community banks and helped keep credit flowing. The bank’s $5 billion deposit base comes mostly from state taxes and funds. The money is leveraged so the bank can offer loans for local small businesses and infrastructure projects; the interest, rather than going to Wall Street banks, stays in the state. The Bank of North Dakota rarely makes direct loans; instead, when a community bank wants to give a sizable loan but lacks the capital, the state bank will partner on the loan and provide a backstop. Such partnerships help ensure that small-business owners, farmers, and ranchers can access lines of credit—and they strengthen community banks, which is why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state.

During times of economic crisis, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, the state bank has been essential to cushioning the blow for North Dakotans. It offers countercyclical support, meaning that in bad times, when credit starts to dry up, it plays an even bigger role in offering credit and helping struggling small banks make loans to good candidates. But the state bank has been good for North Dakota in another way you wouldn’t expect: It’s helped bolster the state budget. Since it became profitable in the 1940s, the Bank of North Dakota has returned more than $555 million to the state’s general fund.

<...>

To many Americans, of course, the idea that state governments should be running banks—that they can run them better—is anti-capitalist blasphemy. But in conservative North Dakota, the bank is so well established and popular that former U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, who’s 64, says he can’t remember a time when anyone seriously challenged it. Now, across the country, some policymakers and community groups want to follow North Dakota’s lead. Since 2009, lawmakers in more than 20 states have filed legislation to either start a state-owned financial institution or at least study the prospects. Most of the efforts have fizzled, but this year lawmakers in several states are cautiously optimistic they can turn their proposals into policy—creating, if not a full--functioning state bank, then at least the groundwork for one.

- more -

http://prospect.org/article/people%E2%80%99s-bank-0