America’s banks and its chief regulators, the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and the Federal Reserve, continue to fall well short of their presumed goals of having everyone in the country hooked up with a banking institution of some sort, at least judging by the rising ranks of the “unbanked” per this report(.pdf) from the FDIC from which the chart below was extracted.
Of course, the rise in “unbanked” individuals (those with no bank accounts at all) from 7.6 percent to 8.2 percent over the last two years and the increase from 18.2 percent to 20.1 percent in the “underbanked” (those with one or more bank accounts but who also rely on non-bank financial services such as payday lenders) probably has less to do with the efforts of the banking industry and more to do with the fact that people have less money these days and that minorities and the poor make up a larger share of the population.
