Reverend Billy asks the question, and makes his case for propping up community banks and helping to support localism in the economy and culture.

It’s hard to imagine Timothy Geithner taking advice from an iconoclast dressed in a white suit, clerical collar and Elvis-inspired hair, but the Reverend Billy may be on to something.

In place of a system where big banks and corporations enter neighborhoods only to profit from them, Reverend Billy wants to empower small banks and credit unions that hold a stake in the communities they serve by offering incentives and making it harder for big finance to undercut local business.

It’s hard to argue against the system he envisions.

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“The Wall Street experience is parallel and equal to the destruction of neighborhoods through chain stores,” Reverend Billy says.

Basic economics are on the Reverend’s side. For every dollar spent at a chain store, studies show only 50 cents stays in that community. By contrast, 90 cents of every dollar spent at a local business remains in the local economy.

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Reverend Billy knows he faces long odds both in his mayoral run and his effort to change a system built around spending and credit speculation, but there are signs of hope. His audience was growing before the financial crisis, and things have only gained momentum since. Later this month, he’ll speak at the Yale Divinity School.

“People qualify their report of pain by saying ‘we’re spending more time with our family and that’s changing our lives,’” Reverend Billy says. “‘Whatever we do next I’m not going back completely to the way I was doing things before,’ they say.”

The leaders we’ve chosen to undertake financial reform are threatening to take us back to where we were by propping up banks and companies that nearly brought down the economy and cost taxpayers trillions.

Read the complete New York Times article Here