Banking in the United States

Banking in the United States is regulated by both the federal and state governments. The five largest banks in the United States at December 31, 2011 were JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. In December 2011, the five largest banks' assets were equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, compared with 43 percent five years earlier.

The U.S. finance industry comprised only 10% of total non-farm business profits in 1947, but it grew to 50% by 2010. Over the same period, finance industry income as a proportion of GDP rose from 2.5% to 7.5%, and the finance industry's proportion of all corporate income rose from 10% to 20%. The mean earnings per employee hour in finance relative to all other sectors has closely mirrored the share of total U.S. income earned by the top 1% income earners since 1930. The mean salary in New York City's finance industry rose from $80,000 in 1981 to $360,000 in 2011, while average New York City salaries rose from $40,000 to $70,000. In 1988, there were about 12,500 U.S. banks with less than $300 million in deposits, and about 900 with more deposits, but by 2012, there were only 4,200 banks with less than $300 million in deposits in the U.S., and over 1,800 with more. American banking is closely linked to the UK; in 2014, the biggest US banks held almost 70 percent of their on and off-balance sheet foreign assets there.

Bank regulation in the United States is highly fragmented compared with other G10 countries. While most of these countries have only one bank regulator, in the U.S., banking is regulated at both the federal and state level. Depending on its type of charter and organizational structure, a banking organization may be subject to numerous federal and state banking regulations. Unlike Japan and the United Kingdom (where regulatory authority over the banking, securities and insurance industries is combined into one single financial-service agency), the U.S. maintains separate securities, commodities, and insurance regulatory agencies—separate from the bank regulatory agencies—at the federal and state level.

U.S. banking regulation addresses privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, anti-usury lending, and the promotion of lending to lower-income populations. Some individual cities also enact their own financial regulation laws (for example, defining what constitutes usurious lending).

...
Wikipedia