Receiving Wide Coverage ... Housing's Tepid Bloom: The housing market recovery is looking a little soft these days. New home sales hit an eight-month low in March, according to Reuters, while applications for home loans also fell last week. This after the National Association of Realtors on Tuesday announced a drop in existing home sales. The latest numbers call into question the theory that the housing market was only hibernating during a tough winter, according to…

By buying more goods and services from businesses rooted in diverse communities, banks can build bridges with those communities and expand their customer base. And by expanding their networks of potential suppliers, banks can obtain better quality services at lower prices.

Those in the industry say customers aren't asking for specific same-day capabilities. Could it be that they aren't asking because they are finding solutions elsewhere?

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Pay Up: Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat's pay package was blessed by shareholders at Citi's annual meeting in St. Louis; proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones had recommended rejecting Corbat's pay, the Wall Street Journal reported. Even so, pension fund giant Calpers voted in favor of the pay packages, the FT said. Shareholders approved all other proxy questions at the two-hour meeting. All this in spite of Citi's recent round of embarrassments:…

The place to debate whether payday lending or any other business should be allowed to operate and have access to the banking system is in the halls of Congress and state legislatures, not in the backrooms of government bureaucracies.

A mediocre solution as unappetizing as that may be, in the long run, is preferable to no solution at all in the secondary mortgage market.

In order for bank CEOs to be included on any "great leaders" list, trust with customers, employees and shareholders must be strong.

Community banks need a steady flow of prospects. A partnership with a successful retail concept virtually guarantees constant customer traffic.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... High Cost of College: Student loans and their myriad associated problems are examined by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post. Some lawmakers want to rein in new programs that forgive student loan debt after a set period of time, as they're becoming far too popular and thus too expensive, the Journal reports.The debt-forgiveness plans have a worthy goal, the WSJ article says: no one should have to "[pay]…

Fannie and Freddie are huge in size, huge in global systemic risk, close to zero in capital, and of fully demonstrated "too big to fail" status. What is stopping the Financial Stability Oversight Council from designating them as systemically important?

Govern Google, regulate nationally, build on that baseline, evidence externalities and reduce demand in order to transform payday from a great divider into a great unifier.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... JPM Shuffle: Shao Zili, JPMorgan Chase's chairman and chief executive in China, will step down from those positions and take over as vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific region as soon as a replacement is found. The unofficial official word from the bank — anony-mice leaked a memo — is that Shao wanted "to return to a regional role." Of course, it's hard not to correlate the departure to federal authorities' ongoing investigation…

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Without meaningful transparency on banks’ financial reports, regulatory capital ratios and living wills, anyone writing about bank earnings is a willing actor in banks’ quarterly earnings Kabuki theater.

Under its aggressive quantitative easing program, the Fed is borrowing short-term and investing long-term, exposing itself to severe interest rate risk when short-term rates rise, writes former Fed economist Scott Hein.