FTR it's not "in control of the banks", Ripple is in control of a single company, Ripple Inc. a privately held, venture backed company based in San Francisco, California. They do have billions in reserve Ripple that have not been sold publicly - most of them are locked up in contracts over several years that prevent them from flooding the market. But they are steadily selling large numbers.
This is a problem for them - if they keep the majority of Ripple held privately they create uncertainty about the future value of Ripple, if they sell them quickly they will crash the XRP price - although realistically probably not more more than it has crashed since the June high through mid-August. I personally think they should just pay them out at now charge to every XRP holder - basically do their own ICO for XRP using XRP. Or fork the Ripple platform to a new one where those coins don't exist or are magically created for existing XRP holders. I'm sure that can be arranged. Then they don't dilute the value and get rid of the uncertainty which will probably really help the value to increase. It will probably cost them something - but I think increased certainty about the future of Ripple could boost the value to more than compensate.
However as I've said before, people really shouldn't be holding XRP as an investment - it was never what it was intended for. Which, one could argue, is why they are keeping billions of XRP back - to discourage speculation. However I've really no idea what they are actually thinking, I'm not associated with them in any way.
Thanks for this good comment.
I totally agree that by increasing certainty about the future of Ripple it's value could go up and also that ripple is not a long term investment but more a kind of a speculation (for me) - I gained some nice money trading it back in May and got stuck with about 1000 XRP when the value crashed (in May it was more than 0.4$) it went down even more in confront of bitcoin.
let's see what will happen as there are always news some are good about the close future ripple price
https://themerkle.com/xrp-price-en-route-to-a-new-all-time-high-thanks-to-korean-traders/