With good reason, scholars and policy makers have focused on the profound industry-wide transformations American banking and finance experienced over the last three decades, emphasizing deregulation, concentration within a handful of giant global banking corporations, their abandonment of the “real economy” for market-based banking grounded in securitization and derivative transactions, and the devastating effects these changes have had on the broader economy. Less clear is the extent to which decentralized systems of smaller, locally owned and operating community banks and credit unions withstood transformations in American finance, providing local economies with alternatives to banking corporations like Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase. Less clear also are whether and how localism, organizational diversity and the persistence of alternatives to “too-big-too-fail” institutions in local economies may have helped them weather the recent storm of a combined financial and economic crisis, whether by sustaining small business, fostering new enterprise formation or dampening employment shocks. Analyzing banking organization and markets at the county and metropolitan area levels, this research documents substantial variation in banking structure across local economies in the US up to and including the current period, confounding a simple narrative of dominance, displacement and homogenization under the aegis of too-big-to-fail banking corporations. It also presents preliminary analyses of whether and how differences in banking structure and the persistence of “Jeffersonian” alternatives to too-big-to-fail bank corporations in local economies affected levels and changes there in the relative size of the small business sector, new establishment formation and unemployment during and “after” the great recession.