My colleague Jim Spencer wrote today about the now-abandoned publicity campaign of the Financial Services Roundtable, led by our former governor Tim Pawlenty, to stop the posting of consumer complaints about banks on a federal web site. Banks wisely chose to distance themselves from this effort, knowing that they're no match for the power of an online consumer's righteous rage.

Now banks will have to endure the same forces that restaurants and hotels, makers of consumer products and every company or charity overseen by the Better Business Bureau have already learned to live with. I think they will survive.

Back in the depths of the mortgage crisis, I got calls and emails almost daily from struggling homeowners who had tales of phenomenal incompetence or misconduct by their lenders. (Examples here, here and here). Their complaints had one thing in common: A feeling that no one was listening.

Outrage over financial institutions' role in triggering the Great Recession gave birth to a new federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That agency plans to do what the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration already do: Publish complaints from regular people.

Here's the Roundtable's view, as Spencer reported.

The Financial Services Roundtable's director of consumer financial services, Anne Wallace, told the Star Tribune in August that posting narratives of consumer complaints could "mislead and confuse." The government, she said, would be giving credence to information it does not verify.

Those words ring rather hollow, coming from an industry that wrecked the U.S. economy by misleading and confusing millions of people. The federal government deserves its share of blame for failing in its oversight of financial institutions and botching its response to the crisis. If one outcome is giving consumers a little bit of a louder voice, I have a suggestion for banks: Shut up and listen. You might learn something.