BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...More on Mary Jo White: The papers scrutinize the financial disclosures of Obama's nominee to lead the SEC. Among other things, they reveal how much she and her husband have made at their respective white-shoe law firms (at least $16 million combined) and the couple's plan to avoid conflicts of interest if she's confirmed (he'd convert his partnership in Cravath, Swaine & Moore to a nonequity one and recuse himself from dealing with the SEC while she's in office). Mary Jo White would get a lump sum retirement payment of $2 million from her employer, Debevoise & Plimpton, within two months of taking the SEC job. According to the Post, her clients have included "JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte & Touche, General Electric and Verizon Communications. Also listed were individuals such as Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs board member convicted of insider trading, and former Bank of America chief executive Kenneth Lewis." Meanwhile, a watchdog group called POGO is, er, jumping all over the SEC's longstanding revolving door problem. New York Times, Washington Post

The stress of margin compression, combined with the need to generate additional income to maintain investors' return on equity hurdles, is driving more and more community banks into riskier activities.

A cashless society is all well and good. But without the option of private, untraceable payments, life would become unbearable and institutions like marriage and religion could suffer.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Barclays Restructuring: After six months on the job, CEO Antony Jenkins will announce a restructuring on Tuesday that "is expected to leave the bank's strategy largely intact," according to the Journal. The British giant's investment bank will slash 2,000 jobs, or 10% of the unit's workforce, and activities that aren't "socially useful" may get the ax, such as "transactions that have no business purpose other than reducing taxes." (Nevertheless, Barclays "will continue to offer tax-minimizing advice. People familiar with the matter say the business has been hiring employees recently.") Best tidbit of all: "Late last year, 125 top managers were taken to a venue in West London to discuss the bank's culture. They looked at case studies of other troubled organizations. The Roman Empire was used to highlight the risk of hubris, says one person who attended. Executives examined a presentation detailing how public zoos evolved from entertainment with animals into centers of learning." Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Telegraph (op-ed by Jenkins in U.K. newspaper)

Data released recently and featured in this issue of Credit Union Journal uncovered a couple of things one would not have imagined all that long ago.

Recently, the five federal financial regulators released proposed guidelines to help banks and credit unions manage their use of social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter.

Bryan Kratz, senior vice president, community financial institutions with First Data explains why you need to have a device strategy.

Tansley Stearns, director of innovation and applied research with the Filene Research Institute, gives lessons in social media for credit unions from Ultimate Fighting Championships.

Most of the losses banks have caused and suffered could be greatly reduced or eliminated without relying on complex regulations and elaborate risk management. Just promulgate and enforce one simple rule: we tolerate no lying.

Once you stop chuckling at the political incorrectness and retro-futurism of this 1959 speech, you sense the privacy dangers that lurk ahead for us in the present day.