BankThink

Why haven't any senior Wall Street executives gone to jail for the financial crisis? PBS' "Frontline" is the latest mass media outlet to ask this increasingly unanswerable question.

The Progressive Campaign Change Committee, a liberal activist group, has recorded over 33,000 names on a petition backing Rep. Barney Frank for a temporary Senate seat.

House Democrats on the Financial Services Committee are not only sending letters to regulators on financial services-related rules in the Dodd-Frank reform law, but they are also focusing on foreign energy extraction.

If you want to avoid catastrophic outcomes, don't rely on stress test models with hundreds of variables. Focus on finding the small number of factors that could individually precipitate failure.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Bank of Japan Fights Deflation: The Bank of Japan took steps toward a "monetary regime change" this Monday, announcing plans "to enact an ambitious program of further monetary easing" and raise its inflation target to 2%. The plan is intended to end "years of corrosive deflation" and was enacted under pressure from Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It involves (and this will sound familiar) "open-ended" asset purchases and a near-zero interest rate policy "as long as it is deemed necessary to achieve its price target." Asset purchases, however, are not set to begin until January 2014. The delay is one reason some analysts are ambivalent about whether this move will help curb deflation and bolster the economy. And, according to the Post, "popular magazines are already forecasting an 'Abe bubble' in share and real estate prices, driven by the money being pumped into the economy through government spending and monetary easing."

It's easy to forget sometimes there remain leaders at credit unions who didn't enter the industry as a freshly minted MBA pursuing a careful "career path." Who began at the bottom with no map for what was ahead. Teri McEwan is one of those people.

A synopsis of a new white paper from the CUNA Lending Council, "Demystifying Private Student Loans," that seeks to clear up some of the misconceptions as well as examine the portfolios of five credit unions that offer these loans.

Our industry has never held as many mortgages as it currently does, and if rates rise rapidly it could result in a catastrophic event. It is vital that CUs have the tools to mitigate this risk.

While the banking industry was recovering from a global financial crisis and reacting to the prospects of new regulations, smart entrepreneurs were finding new and better solutions to people's problems.

Real GSE reform could take years. That's too bad, but in the meantime, the FHFA can start to redesign the securitization process – and phase out redundancies between Fannie and Freddie.