A Bank of California might make sense, and be a good place for the State and local governments to park their funds, in addition to offering private banking, so

A Bank of California might make sense, and be a good place for the State and local governments to park their funds, in addition to offering private banking, so long as it has a mandate to be profitable. A network of credit unions across the State to handle community finance and banking, that might make sense; it’s for residents or people of a particular class (police, students, teachers, or people who reside in a particular county) to park their accounts. I mean it’s essentially community banking with a shared interest group, and having enough of them endorsed by the State would take political pressure off the Bank of California to expand into areas which would be unprofitable. Postal Savings Unions, as a kind of last resort for people who can’t open an account anywhere else, to encourage savings? Why not. As long as you don’t have to go through Congress, the State of California night even be able to enter into a contract with USPS to provide that for people here, and maybe even use the post offices around the State as a backbone for a new ATM network, better if we can eliminate ATM fees for these institutions. Take all of these together, and you’ve got the workings of a pretty decently sized network of local, publicly interested banking and savings institutions and hopefully none of them too big to fail or too small to be profitable. That said, city run banks? I love my city, as much as I complain about it, I grew up here, and I would not trust the Board of Supervisors to stake the creditworthiness of the City and County of San Francisco on a Public Bank. Doing it at the State level is still risky, but it might be a risk worth taking since California isn’t a monoculture much as our critics might think it to be, and that is a much larger pool of funds that wouldn’t be enriching large private national and international banks. There might be real savings to be had for taxpayers there. I don’t believe that to be true about San Francisco. We might be bigger than North Dakota, but I think it is a poor fit for our city’s culture to get into banking. At least a credit union (there are several here already) funded by residents is a lot more insulated from our own political machinery, even if the constituency is mostly overlapping.