BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...JPMorgan Shuffles in New CFO: JPMorgan Chase has named Marianne Lake as its new chief financial officer. As this American Banker article points out, the appointment of a new CFO was to be expected, given Doug Braunstein's apparent demotion back in July following the more than $6 billion in trading losses caused by the London Whale. (It should be noted that, on the record, the bank's CEO Jamie Dimon is telling news outlets the move has "nothing" to do with the trading losses and that Braunstein is transitioning to a role as vice chairman at the company in order to return "to his true love of investment banking.") The selection of Lake, on the other hand, was a bit less predictable, given the current financial chief of JPM's retail banking unit is, as Reuters notes, "a little-known executive" within the financial institution. (Other internal candidates up for the job included commodities chief Blythe Masters and Lou Rauchenberger, a top aide within the corporate and investment bank.) It also bucks the trend "of large banks often looking outside their finance departments for their CFOs lately," the Journal says. Dimon listed Lake's talent with numbers, high IQ and experience "on the consumer side and wholesale side" among her strengths while discussing the appointment. And, while he also maintained appointing a woman to the finance-chief job "wasn't a consideration at all," many news outlets were apt to give a nod to JPM for promoting gender equity in the C-suit, with the Journal and the Times quick to anoint Lake one of the most powerful women on Wall Street. As American Banker magazine Editor in Chief Heather Landy tweeted "Marianne Lake may not be the 1st female CFO of a giant U.S. bank - see @SallieKrawcheck - but this still feels like a big leap for womankind."

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating 51 nonbank firms involved in mortgage lending or other areas of the housing market.

Capital is just not an issue for these banks. All the capital they may ever need is a phone call and wire transfer away.

John Allison, former chairman and chief executive of BB&T, made a pitch to abolish the Federal Reserve at a Dodd-Frank Act seminar.

Instead of pushing to avoid risk retention or liability for future frauds, banks that want to originate and sell mortgages should focus on containing and rolling back the disparate impact doctrine, which seems sure to savage them.

The FHA's mission to promote housing has contributed to its downfall in addressing its other mission: to maintain fiscal discipline of the mortgage insurance fund.

If you have a successful model that you believe in, it doesn't matter what the establishment says.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...For Sale: HSBC is in talks to sell its stake in China's Ping An Insurance, which is worth $9 billion to $9.5 billion, depending on which paper you believe. A deal could net the bank around $7.5 billion. The FT name drops "Thai billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, who controls the Charoen Pokphand Group" as a potential buyer. While the move is apparently not in line with HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver's statement last year that he had no intention of selling its big stake in Chinese companies, it does fit in with his modus operandi of making "streamlining HSBC's sprawling global operations and increasing profitability" a priority. Papers also attribute the sale to stricter capital requirements set to go into effect next year that make holding a stake in financial institutions more "onerous." HSBC is, however, likely to retain its stake in other Chinese companies, including in the Bank of Communications. Financial Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal

To offer credit as a means of promoting savings is a bit like a hospital encouraging people to get sick so they can be healed.

A response to Credit Union Journal's "NCUA Conversion Rules Mock Democracy".