I'm surprised by the contraversy of my comment. Maybe I should have been clearer.

The banking /system/ in europe is superiour. It's crazy that the US isn't part of the IBAN system. ACHs suck, etc.

Revolut and Transferwise help a lot with country level bank shortcomings. But they're not really the same as those banks. And they're exactly two mega companies. In Portugal, there is MBWay, and in Denmark there was Visa Electron (might have changed). These payment systems are used everywhere here due to their low fee at the exclusion of other payment systems. I appreciate the low fees to the vendor but it means that Revolut and transferwise are not an every day banking solution here.

When I lived in Denmark, I could not get a visa electron card despite being a resident because I didn't have credit in the EU. This made me use cash for everything as local businesses did not take normal bank cards / credit cards.

In Portugal, banks charge to keep your money in them without offering interest. As an American, managing interest payments from a non-domestic bank is a tax nightmare so I wouldn't want it anyway. But it's notable that they don't have to compete here at all. It was the same, as I remember, in the other EU countries I was in. In contrast, US banks can be found offering competitive interest rates though brokerages are a better option, still.

My point was not some kind of America versus EU nonsense that this seems to have attracted. It's that banks had an outsized influence on politics in the EU.

If you look at the distribution of market cap of industries in the EU versus the US, you'll note that the financial industry in Europe is much larger as a percentage. Step back and think about what that represents.

The US economy has 14% of public economy in financials vs 25% in the EU:

https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/255599/msci-usa-imi-net... https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/b32acc80-b116-454b-a9c4...

A financial industry being the proportially largest sector is not a good thing. It's a rent that's being extracted from the productive economy.

There has also been a huge decline in bank count in Europe as they consolidate: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/CBD2/CBD2.Q.B0._Z.1...

A decline in business counts is not good. It's not good that the same trend for other business types is happening in the US, either. Western governments are now favoring large businesses that hold political capital at the expense of the smaller businesses. This isn't good no matter the industry.

We should all want our businesses and governments to improve. To do that, we must first understand deeply the problems.