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As an outsider, can you help me put your post in context - is 31k banks posit as good or bad state of things?

(it seems an insane state of things to me, with incredible overhead and inefficiency but again, I'm an outsider. I've lived in USA for a while in late 90s and state of banking from consumer perspective in USA seemed a decade behind Canada and Europe, but that was a long long time ago)

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I see less banks as being strictly worse. It's the same as with any other company. Yes that's less efficient, but it's the only way to prevent individuals from having too much power. Because almost anyone with that kind of power will eventually give in. Just look at tech companies; I, for one, am not satisfied with the status quo.

There are two ways to have a functioning society. One is to have very few very powerful people, and only choose the right leaders. The other is to have very many people with very little power. That's less efficient, but it's also much less risky.

We currently run on the first. It's not going well. I'm not aware of a time when we ran on the second. In my mind that's the only way.

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