The larger a bank gets, the less it cares about small businesses.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]

[link removed]

**SEPTEMBER 24, 2025**

Click to read this email in your browser. [link removed]

In rapid succession recently, I got two emails from people who had horror stories about actions by their banks that ended their businesses. (When I asked them how they found me, they both said they asked ChatGPT for investigative financial journalists and my name came up. I have finally found a use case for AI!) The stories were very different but had a common thread. Instead of the traditional relationship between small businesses and community lenders, these two businesses were working with KeyBank and Wells Fargo, two big banks whose headquarters were far from their locations. 

Large financial institutions don’t have the same stake in the community as smaller banks; they aren’t putting up their own shareholder dollars when they lend to a small business. And they don’t have the same personal relationships with their borrowers, which can save a small business from their inevitable stumbles and mistakes. In these two cases [link removed], viable companies were shuttered and lives upended, and the owners claim it was entirely due to the decisions of their banks. It was a good lens through which to view the changing landscape of finance in America, and what we have lost amid rampant consolidation.

**–David Dayen, executive editor**

[link removed]

Jandos Rothstein/iStock

Big Banks Behaving Badly [link removed]

One Tuesday night in July 2023, Ron Luessen got contacted by a late-shift worker on the support team for Elcon, a construction firm in the Pacific Northwest. Luessen, an equipment manager, was off the clock, but he was the main point of contact, and the worker was puzzled. “We’re supposed to be working tonight, and this place is closed,” Luessen recalled the message. “What do you want us to do?”

There wasn’t any reason for the building to be closed. Elcon was steadily busy, recently picking up business in Billings, Montana, beyond its base of operations in Seattle. The company had even just updated the kitchens.

But the next day, around 120 Elcon employees got the official word: Don’t come in. After 42 years building bridges, highways, rail lines, airports, and basic infrastructure Americans use every day, Elcon was history.

Several months later, Abilene Eplin, a single mother of three, was building a company that set up electronic payment terminals for businesses. She was able to sign a major contract with an automotive dealership group, projecting revenue of $1.1 million per year with the potential to scale past $2 million. It was the fulfillment of a year of toil.

Yet one day, she went to withdraw funds from the company bank account, and the transaction was blocked. Someone else had claimed that they were the sole owner of the business, preventing Eplin from accessing her money. Eplin provided copious evidence that she in fact owned the business, but 19 months later, she has been unable to pry one cent out of the hijacked account.

The common thread in these two stories—one company’s demise after decades of success, and another snuffed out right at its incipiency—is the role of the large, impersonal institutions that served as their bankers. KeyBank, a Cleveland-based regional lender with $185 billion [link removed] in assets under management, decided to call in Elcon’s loans, instantly vaporizing the company and destroying its value. Wells Fargo, America’s fourth-largest bank [link removed] by asset size, froze Eplin’s business account and has declined to release the funds, extinguishing her dream of owning her own company.

Among the many reasons given for today’s sour economic mood, we don’t talk much about small businesses with enduring financial needs that have been forced into shotgun weddings with soulless institutions that are disinterested in their futures. “One of the reasons money is channeled through banks, they’re supposed to be on the ground, they’re supposed to know clients,” said Graham Steele, former assistant secretary for financial institutions in Joe Biden’s Treasury Department. “The larger an institution gets, the less they care about small businesses.”

Continue reading this story [link removed]

**ON OUR SITE**

Led by Fox, journalists have embedded with ICE operations [link removed], compromising basic standards of journalistic integrity.

While Trump howls about crime in liberal cities, he is taking drastic action [link removed] to make it
worse everywhere.

[link removed]

Read more about the [link removed]

IDEAS, POLITICS, and POWER [link removed]

that shape the world around us at [link removed]

prospect.org [link removed]

[link removed]

**Support**

**The American Prospect**

We're a small, non-profit newsroom. Our independent reporting is supported by readers like you.

YOUR TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM prospect.org/donate

Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.**The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States**
You are receiving this newsletter because you have signed up for our service.
To opt out of American Prospect membership, donation or advertising messaging, click here [link removed].
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

[link removed]

Sent to: [email protected]

Unsubscribe [link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States