BankThink

The Many Benefits of Brokered Deposits

04/08/11

Recent bank failures have given brokered deposits a bad rap, writes George Sutton, a former Utah commissioner of financial institutions. When used properly, they carry benefits that vastly outweigh the isolated instances where they are misused, he says.

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Memory Lane: How the '95 Government Shutdown Affected Banks

04/07/11

If the budget impasse forces a government shutdown, most of the federal banking agencies will remain open. But history shows a federal shutdown can affect banks in other ways.

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Keep the Mortgage, Switch the House

04/04/11

For underwater borrowers looking to relocate, why not allow banks to simply substitute new collateral for old, charging a fee for the service?

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Regulations Are Burying Small Banks Alive

04/01/11

Some 7,000 community banks have been thrown under the Dodd-Frank bus and are feeling the full brunt of the financial "reform" legislation. The 2,300-page bill will heap at least 10,000 pages of new regulations on community banks while doing almost nothing to solve the problems that brought us to financial panic in 2008.

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Even in Disclosure, Fed Shows Propensity to Obfuscate

03/31/11

The Fed's data dump Thursday was at least as noteworthy for how it was disclosed as for what it disclosed. The information was made available on computer disks - wait, people still use those? - that reporters could pick up from the Fed's building in Washington (or have mailed to them if they were willing to wait). Viewable on the disks were reams of documents captured in an overwhelming number of unsearchable PDF images meant to be opened one by one.

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Mortgage Brokers, It's Time to Get Real

03/30/11

It is high time mortgage lenders stopped acting like victims and started exercising the responsibility that comes with the rich fees they earn from lending. And why on earth would banks not want to police their brokers?

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Dodd-Frank's Bizarre Notion of 'Ability to Pay'

03/30/11

Maybe the idea was that banks were too stupid to see that they needed to "consider" ability to pay, but once compelled to consider it, they would make better lending decisions.

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Pro or Con, Durbin Rule Gets Out the Vote

03/11/11

A reader poll on the effects of the debit interchange cap galvanized both sides of the argument, sparking 10 times American Banker's average response and even a rallying cry over Twitter from the Independent Community Bankers of America.

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The Proposed Servicing Settlement, Through Servicers' Eyes

03/08/11

Mortgage servicers call the 27-page proposal unfair and impractical. It's hard to see them convincing regulators of the former, but the latter objection is harder to dismiss out of hand.

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Fed Official Compares Congress to Lindsay Lohan

03/07/11

WASHINGTON - Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is known for using colorful analogies in his speeches, but he may have reached a new high - or low, depending on your point of view - by comparing Congress to Lindsay Lohan, whose problems with drugs are well known and who was recently charged with shoplifting.

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