In the midst of a financial crisis, Americans have been following common-sense rules that should have been followed for the past few decades. These include balancing checkbooks, reducing debt and credit purchases, and essentially not spending money they do not have. While the means to which we reached this end (failing financial institutions, skyrocketing unemployment, "The Great Recession") are far from ideal, if any good comes out of this whole ordeal, it is the rise of fiscal responsibility beginning at the grassroots level.
But herein lies the problem. Financial institutions like large banks don't make as much money when they have smart, fiscally responsible consumers. In 2009
banks stood to make over $38 billion in overdraft fees; fees that they raised during the recession to rake in more money. The overdraft situation got so out of hand that
Congress stepped in to regulate the way banks go about charging customers for spending money they do not have.
