BankThink

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asked state attorneys general to sign a cooperation agreement to protect shared confidential information, but most Republican AGs are declining to sign.

Andrew Kahr blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's affordable housing goals for helping "inflate" the housing bubble. Former GOP appointees at HUD see it differently.

A federal charter will allow lenders to provide more credit alternatives with lower costs as well as flexible payback periods and loan amounts to underbanked consumers.

The SEC has a lot of rules to implement for Dodd-Frank, and as we know, much of that has been slow-going. The agency had been posting a timetable for action on its website, but "this summer, the agency quietly removed timing estimates from its list of pending Dodd-Frank mandates, largely because the estimates were rarely accurate, officials said," reports a Wall Street Journal blog.

The theme of many Dodd-Frank two-year anniversary articles this summer was all about how many rules required by the legislation were still up in the air. That might be about to change.

Every consumer should have access to a low-cost, full service bank account that helps them make necessary payments, manage cash flow and avoid ancillary fees.

A simpler calculation isn't necessarily the right one. If a capital ratio misrepresents a bank's risk or creates incentives to take on more of it, simple is scarcely an improvement.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Goldman CFO to Retire: David Viniar, who has served as Goldman Sachs' chief financial officer since its 1999 IPO, plans to retire in January and take a "non-independent" seat on the board. The 57-year-old will be succeeded by Harvey Schwartz, nine years his junior, in what the Journal describes as Goldman's "first nod to a group of younger leaders." In another Journal story, analyst Meredith Whitney is quoted interpreting Viniar's retirement as a "signal that relative calm has arrived" for Goldman. "Viniar has wanted to retire for years," Whitney says, "but because he was seen as such a source of stability for the firm and so trusted by the analyst and investor community, coupled with the increased scrutiny for the industry and particularly Goldman," the company loyalist couldn't bring himself to leave until now. (The wags at DealBreaker like to refer to Viniar by his nickname "Bones," which, at least in this context, appears to be a reference to Star Trek's trusty Dr. McCoy.) The FT notes that Schwartz will inherit an "unusually broad portfolio": In addition to the usual duties of a CFO, Viniar also oversees risk management, regulation and technology. And as the overseer of risk, Viniar signed off on Goldman's highly profitable bet against mortgage credit during the throes of the crisis, another FT story points out. Schwartz's background — he was the co-head of the securities division, and earlier the head of sales for that division — is "more salesy than treasury-y," writes DealBreaker's Matt Levine. Additional coverage in the New York Times

While deposit-driven financial institutions, at best, could use small-dollar loans to bring in customers who would later purchase other products, installment lenders have been successfully serving underserved communities for close to 100 years.

We can only speculate about the real purpose for the Volcker Rule.