Olivia Maiers, spokeswoman for the Iowa Credit Union League, reports that members have gain 7,000 new members and $49 million in new deposits since the beginning of September. Nationally, credit unions have gain 650,000 customers and added $4.5 billion in new accounts during that same time, according to the Credit Union National Association.

The national organization adds that four out of every five of their affiliated credit unions have reported the increase is due to attempts by larger banks to raise customer fees, the Bank Transfer Day movement or a combination of both.

Bank Transfer Day organizer Kristen Christian explained the logic behind the movement on the group’s Facebook page.

“I started this because I felt like many of you do. I was tired — tired of the fee increases, tired of not being able to access my money when I need to, tired of them using what little money I have to oppress my brothers & sisters. So I stood up. I’ve been shocked at how many people have stood up alongside me.” Christian wrote. “Me closing my account all on my lonesome wouldn’t have made a difference to these fat cats. But each of you standing up with me…they can’t drown out the noise we’ll make.”

Big banks like Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank have also taken flak for attempting to impose additions fees on customers who use debt cards, although many of the banks have withdrawn their plans due to public outcry.

On Saturday two of the larger banks will be targeted by members of the Occupy Iowa movement in Des Moines as part of “Bank Transfer Day.” The individuals plan to demonstrate at the Ingersoll Avenue Wells Fargo and Bank of America locations, and The Iowa Independent will have coverage of the event.

Credit unions are member-owned and non-profit; they typically have fewer fees than corporate banks. Credit unions across the country, including some in Iowa, have been offering special promotions and extending hours in preparation for Bank Transfer Day, CUNA said.

“Our struggling economy is not the disease, it’s the symptom,” according to one such campaign. ”There is mounting evidence to prove that big banks with their profit-at-all-costs agenda are actually making our collective disease worse by systematically making choices that undermine the efforts of regulators and ordinary people like us to make changes and get back to a state of health.”

The ICUL posted “Four Tips for a Smooth Bank Transfer Day.” The tips include moving accounts in advance of the Saturday, Nov. 5, date if possible and opening a the new account before closing the old one, to allow for electronic transfer. If individuals must wait until Saturday, they may want to arrive earlier since interest suggests there could be lines. Finally, keep a little cash in your pocket for expenses while all the details are ironed out.

(Jon Collins and  Marcos Restrepo contributed to this report.)

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms — which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges — are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4 percent increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

The data showed that revenue was expected to rise at 29 of the 35 firms surveyed, but at a slower pace than pay. Wall Street revenue is expected to rise 3 percent, to $448 billion from $433 billion, despite a slowdown in some high-profile activities like stock and bond trading.

Overall, Wall Street is expected to pay 32.1 percent of its revenue to employees, the same as last year, but below the 36 percent in 2007. Profits, which were depressed by losses in the past two years, have bounced back from the 2008 crisis. But the estimated 2010 profit of $61.3 billion for the firms surveyed still falls about 20 percent short from the record $82 billion in 2006. Over that same period, compensation across the firms in the survey increased 23 percent.

How are the banks making so much, despite the crummy economy? For one, reduced competition. Hundreds of hedge funds and a number of banks died between 2007 and 2009, leaving the others to pick up their business. Additionally, the carry trade. It is unbelievably cheap for big banks to borrow from the government, and they are picking up money on the margin when they lend it out. Moreover, big banks haven’t yet reckoned with the foreclosure fraud crisis. Nobody knows how much that will cost them, but some are estimating in the billions.

The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010 was designed to remove impediments to interstate commerce.  While we share this goal, we believe it is necessary to have further deliberations about the intended and unintended impact of this bill on consumer protections, including those for mortgages, before this bill can be finalized.

Notarizations are important for a large range of documents, including financial documents.  As the President has made clear, consumer financial protections are incredibly important, and he has made this one of his top priorities, including signing into law the strongest consumer protections in history in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  That is why we need to think through the intended and unintended consequences of this bill on consumer protections, especially in light of the recent developments with mortgage processors.

The authors of this bill no doubt had the best intentions in mind when trying to remove impediments to interstate commerce.  We will work with them and other leaders in Congress to explore the best ways to achieve this goal going forward.

H.R. 3808 went barely noticed in the press, and even among members of Congress, until it reached Obama’s desk as the foreclosure fraud crisis came to light. Housing advocates vocally insisted that Obama veto the legislation, as it might make it easier for banks to force foreclosure-related evictions using paperwork without the proper signatures.

In the past, Warren has lambasted banks for purposefully creating opaque, obscure products to make a buck off of customers. (Her infamous phrase for some financial products? “Tricks and traps.”) But this time, in one of her first official appearances as a member of the administration, she took a conciliatory tone.

She continued to use the folksy cant she has picked up in the last few weeks. “My first public meeting after [my current] appointment was with bankers — bankers from Oklahoma, where I grew up, where my grandmother drove a wagon in the land rush, and where I learned to sing Boomer Sooner before I learned Old MacDonald,” she said to open her remarks. (Did she always talk like this?)

Then, the tone went conciliatory. “We are not working on the theory that all the men and all the women connected with finance, either as workers or investors, are to be regarded as guilty of some undefined crime,” she said, according to prepared remarks. “On the contrary, we hold that business based on good will should be encouraged.”

Warren pressed for a principles-based, rather than rules-based approach — describing questions like “Can a customer easily understand what this product does?” as more important than “Should we ban companies from selling redundant insurance for certain title problems?”

Nevertheless, the old attitude did shine through. “[C]redit agreements have gotten long and complicated. In fact, there’s a new epithet: fine print. I understand that some of you call it ‘mice type.’ Where I come from, nobody calls fine print, hidden fees and surprise penalties ‘negotiated contract terms’ or ‘innovations.’”

She continued: “On a polite day, my brothers in Oklahoma call that kind of stuff ‘garbage.’ They don’t care if it is there because regulators required it, because the companies’ lawyers were trying to ward off lawsuits, or because it was a good place to hide another new fee. They simply see a world in which the financial institutions they do business with are not on their side. Every surprise hidden in the fine print is a bad surprise.

“Instead of seeing banks as their friends — as I did when I put my babysitting money in a savings account at Penn Square National Bank so my brothers didn’t borrow it out of my sock drawer — too many Americans see dealing with banks like handling snakes — do it long enough and you’ll get bit.”

And there it is: conciliatory but wary, soft enough to charm banks and stringent enough to please the progressives that fought to make sure Warren had the role.

“Effectively, what we’ve seen and a lot of other people have seen is we need to give them a better understanding of who we are and what we do,” David Wells, a spokesman for Goldman, told DealBook. “This is meant to help do that.”

The campaign, which is being overseen by the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, kicked off Wednesday with full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  It will include print advertisements in national, regional and local newspapers and banner advertisements on various Web sites and is planned to continue into 2011, Mr. Wells said.

I can just imagine the ads now:

Goldman Sachs. Making billions off the financialization of the U.S. economy since 1869. Making billions off the carry trade since 2008.

The company’s current slogan, addressed at other businesses, is “Our client’s interest always comes first.” Suspect.

Here’s a scary thought: Let’s say the European sovereign debt crisis flares up again, and one or two Euro banks fail. (Not a bank like UBS or Deutsche Bank, but a medium-sized bank like Bank of Greece or a Landesbank.) That, in turn, causes a U.S. money market fund — many of which have large exposures to Euro banks — to “break the buck,” which leads to another run on money market funds.

The Fed would be powerless to help. The Fed’s emergency lending authority (the famed Section 13(3)) requires that any emergency lending facility to non-banks be approved “by the affirmative vote of not less than five members” of the Fed Board of Governors. Currently, there are only four members of the Fed board: Bernanke, Warsh, Elizabeth Duke, and Dan Tarullo. Donald Kohn retired earlier this month, and the Senate has yet to vote on Obama’s three nominees (Janet Yellen, Peter Diamond, and Sarah Bloom Raskin).

While I don’t expect this scenario to happen, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. And if it did happen, the Fed would have to sit on the sidelines and watch the carnage unfold.

I understand that Senate floor time is scarce (really, I do), but this absolutely has to be at the top of the list. Yes, I know it would be time-consuming to overcome Sen. Shelby’s opposition, but you know what? Screw Shelby. This has to get done, and soon.

Let’s translate a bit. The worst of the financial crisis — not the whole recession, including housing and jobs and businesses and investment, just the part of the recession that really mucked up the United States’ big banks — hit in the fall of 2008. Lending markets seized. That did not just mean that banks could not give loans to homeowners or companies. It meant that banks had trouble loaning cash to one another.

The Federal Reserve recognized the credit crunch as a catastrophe, and immediately took extraordinary measures to prevent the equivalent of an old-fashioned bank run in the invisible interbank lending market. Out of thin air, the Fed created programs like the Term Asset Loan Facility, a $1 trillion fund to secure the asset-backed securitization market — a major source of financing for banks and other companies. The alphabet soup of emergency Fed programs, including TALF, helped to thaw credit markets and stabilize the banking system.

But, Economics of Contempt notes, due to the opposition of one senator — Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) — the Fed does not have enough seated members on its board to create such programs in a crisis. And Congress does not have the wherewithal or speed to create them itself. Granted, there’s no emergency on the horizon. But, given that the United States is suffering from, oh, possible disinflation, mass long-term unemployment and record high debts, now is hardly the time to short-staff the central bank.

At The New York Times, Sewell Chan has more details on the problem of vacancies in important economic positions.

According to the Ethics Committee, around September 7, 2008 — the date that the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — OneUnited CEO Kevin Cohee contacted Waters to ask for her help in setting up a meeting with officials at the Department of Treasury regarding the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That takeover resulted in total losses to all Fannie and Freddie stockholders, including OneUnited [a bank on whose board Waters' husband used to sit, and a bank he remained invested in].

[...]

Waters called the Treasury Department on September 8, 2008 and arranged the meeting with Treasury for the National Bankers Association, a trade organization for minority- and women-owned banks of which OneUnited was a member. Though the AU investigation and Ethics Committee disagree whether anyone but OneUnited officials were in attendance, a group representing NBA and including executives from OneUnited met with Treasury Department officials on September 9, 2008 to discuss the impact of the Fannie and Freddie takeover on minority-owned banks. She then directed her chief of staff, Mikael Moore, to follow up on the results of the meeting.

At the same time, the Ethics Committee says, Waters had her chief of staff — Moore, her grandson — email Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the head of the House Financial Services Committee, to say the bank was in trouble. Frank advised Waters and her office to stay out of it because of her conflicts of interest. But she allegedly continued to intervene on the bank’s behalf. The bank ultimately received $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. The Ethics Committee argues Waters’ husband would have lost money were it not for that bailout.

The Ethics Committee charges that Waters violated three rules: dispensing a favor, not acting “in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House” and using her influence for personal benefit. Waters denies wrongdoing and has chosen to fight the charges.

[P]olicymakers must respond forcefully, creatively, and decisively to severe financial crises. Early in the Depression, policymakers’ responses ran the gamut from passivity to timidity. They were insufficiently willing to challenge the orthodoxies of their day….A key turning point, in the United States, came with Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to bold experimentation after his inauguration in 1933. Some of his experiments failed or were counterproductive, but [some decisions] helped arrest the descent of the U.S. financial system and set off a strong, albeit incomplete, recovery.

He argues that this crisis could have been as bad as the last one, were it not for advances in monetary policymaking. The statement reads not just as an appreciation of Roosevelt’s eventual decision to leave behind the gold standard, but as a counter today’s criticism of Bernanke’s more activist Fed. Senators such as Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) have hit Bernanke with withering criticism for failing to prevent the crisis before it occurred and to act until after the markets started seizing, being too generous in bailing out faltering banks, and then stretching the Federal Reserve’s mandate and policy operations far, far beyond their historical and possibly statutory limits.

But in this speech, Bernanke reinforces the point that — regardless of what he did not do before the markets went south — he acted with necessary strength and “creativity” once the crisis hit:

[O]ur traditional tools, developed in an earlier era, were of little use in addressing panic in the shadow banking system or in the money market mutual fund industry. So, we engaged in what I call “blue sky thinking” — generating many ideas. Most were discarded, but, crucially, some led to the development of new ways for the Federal Reserve to fulfill the traditional stabilization function of central banks.

Notably, Bernanke also addressed the repurchase agreement market in the news this morning:

In the shadow banking system, loans, instead of being held on the books of banks as was virtually always the case in the 1930s, were packaged together in complex ways and sold to investors. Many of these complex securities were held in off-balance-sheet vehicles financed by short-term funding. When the housing slump shook investors’ faith in the values of the loans underlying the securities, short-term funding dried up quickly, threatening the banks and other financial institutions that explicitly or implicitly stood behind the off-balance-sheet vehicles. This was a new type of run, analogous in many ways to the bank runs of the 1930s, but in a form which was not well anticipated by financial institutions or regulators.

That might read as a bit of financial gobbledygook, but the point is simple: Policymakers now understand the financial crisis as, essentially, an old-fashioned bank run in the under-regulated “shadow” banking system, comprised of financial institutions that are not registered as banks. And how those banks are monitored and regulated is crucial to financial stability now.

A total of 18 banks, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, use the repurchase agreement, or repo, market to lower their debt temporarily. The repo market is, to simplify, a market banks and other big financial institutions use to exchange equity for cash for short periods of time and the market on which there was a kind of bank run during the crisis. (More on that later.)

The Wall Street Journal says the firms were reducing their debt levels more than 40 percent beyond their quarterly averages. What’s worse? “The practice of reducing quarter-end repo borrowings has occurred periodically for years, according to the data, which go back to 2001, but never as consistently as in 2009.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission — in the wake of the revelation last month that Lehman Brothers used such transactions to park billions of debt off its balance sheet shortly before its collapse — is investigating banks’ use of the tactic. In my mind, there is one dead simple way to preclude banks from skewing their debt and leverage levels using repo transactions (which are, I should note, common, important and perfectly legal): Require banks to report not just their debt levels at the time the reports come out, but their quarterly average debt levels, thus removing the incentive to alter them.