Bring Back Postal Banking

This is an interesting idea, Bring Back Postal Banking.

"The venerable agency has been saddled with significant financial problems since a 2006 law forced it to pre-fund 75 years of employee retirement benefits, something no other public agency or private company has to do. This cash crunch (the Postal Service gets no money from the federal government and must survive on the revenues it generates) has led to austerity measures for the nation’s second-largest employer (right behind Wal-Mart). Mass layoffs last year were followed, earlier this month, by the announcement that Saturday deliveries of first-class mail will cease come August. As many have noted, this is a largely manufactured crisis. Simply relaxing the pre-funding requirement—as the postmaster general beseeched Congress to do this week—would wipe out virtually all of the Postal Service’s deficit. (Absent this heavy payment, the agency would have made $100 million in the last quarter.)"

"These roughly 68 million unbanked or underbanked Americans represent a huge market for non-bank financial predators…In other countries, this market is served at the post office. Almost every developed nation in Europe and East Asia operates a postal banking system...What’s more, we used to have a postal banking system of our own. Starting in 1911, the United States Postal Savings system allowed Americans to deposit cash with certain branch offices of the Postal Service, at 2% interest. The system held $3.4 billion in deposits for four million people by 1947; though it lost its advantage of depository insurance in the 1930s with the advent of the FDIC, it survived until 1967."