BankThink

Edward Speed, recently retired CEO of the $2-Billion Texas Dow Employees Credit Union, discusses his management lesson.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall: U.S. stock markets are closed today as Hurricane Sandy approaches the Northeast. The financial district in lower Manhattan (including American Banker's office) has been evacuated, the transit system has been shut down and flights are being canceled. Federal offices and the Metro in D.C. are also closed. So if you're in California and someone in New York or Washington doesn't return your call today, don't take it personally. Our colleagues at American Banker report that banks are bracing for the storm's arrival with the goal of avoiding interruptions in operations. For general stories read the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and of course weather.com.

If U.S. regulators proceed with anything like the 2010 Basel III proposal on liquidity, important bank products such as brokered deposits may simply disappear.

The CFPB isn’t going away, and if Romney’s elected president there’s a good chance the leadership structure will change in the long run. It's the short run scenario that could get interesting.

With limited resources to invest in new technologies, banks need to place small bets on a portfolio of promising options, team up with innovation partners and exceed customer expectations.

It is one thing to see an irrelevant ad on a billboard in Las Vegas, but it's quite another to get an irrelevant message from an institution who knows more about me than many of my relatives.

The Dodd-Frank QM rule will restrict the availability of credit, but it can be less invasive if the CFPB develops a model that weighs all relevant risk factors, not just a few measures of capacity to repay.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Libor Probe Widens: You can add nine more big banks to the already too-long list of financial institutions being investigated for alleged attempts to rig the London interbank offered rate. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (we're sure that name sounds familiar) and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen have issued subpoenas to Societe Generale, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd., Norinchukin Bank, Rabobank, Lloyd's Banking Group and West LB AG in recent months in order to determine whether the firms played a part in any Libor-manipulation schemes. It was already widely known that seven banks, including Barclays and JPMorgan Chase, have received subpoenas related to the attorneys general investigations, thanks, in part, to an unnamed source "familiar with the matter" and several disclosures in financial filings. The investigation is part of a larger, global probe into the Libor scandal. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post

A report by Federal Financial Analytics concludes that the FDIC has made admirable progress implementing the part of the Dodd-Frank Act that gives it the authority to unwind large financial companies in trouble, but there are are still a number of outstanding issues that need to be resolved.

The Uniform Law Commission's commercial code excludes debit cards, which is problematic since courts tend to reject class-action challenges that conflict with it.