Occupy Wall Street, "Fringe Banking" and Public Options

I happened to walk by Zuccoti Park in Manhattan yesterday, where the Occupy Wall Street protest is centered. I picked up a few pieces of protester literature. I can't say that I was in any way comprehensive in my collection. Some of the literature was just nuts, e.g., a flier blathering about admiralty law usurping the common law and the Trading with the Enemies Act. This flier could just as easily have been found at a Tea Party gathering. It gave new meaning to the term "fringe banking." 

But I also picked up a thoughtful and intelligent, for example a flier about public banking and the Bank of North Dakota (the only state-owned bank in the United States).  Hmmm.  That sounds like a public option for banking. If the financial system is broken, maybe it needs some better competition. It's not such a crazy idea. We actually already do that quite a bit in the mortgage market-FHA, VA, RHS, Ginnie Mae, and historically the FHLBs, HOLC and Fannie Mae (Susan Wachter and I have a forthcoming book chapter on this, to be posted to SSRN soon). We've even done it in straight banking--most people forget that we used to have a U.S. Post Office Bank. We have an FDIC that used to compete with private bank insurance funds (see the opening chapters of Kathleen Day's S&L Hell for a description of the private Maryland S&L insurance fund that failed). And we have federal (public) currency that used to compete with and has now supplanted private bank notes.  My point here is not to endorse public options or not, but merely to note that historically they were a response to failed private markets and should be part of the policy discussion.