BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Leeway on Liquidity: The Basel Committee rejected the banking industry’s pleas to delay the new global liquidity coverage ratio requirement, which will take effect in 2015, as scheduled. However, the group of international regulators said it would let banks temporarily dip into their emergency supplies of cash and liquid assets in times of stress. This came as “a relief to some bankers who feared the LCR would mimic the Basel capital standards; banks that fall below the minimum capital threshold are at immediate risk of shut down or government takeover,” the FT says. Financial Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal

Communicate with your members to protect them from other lenders who might solicit them with loans or other financial products not in the borrowers' best interest.

Before they are lost and resurrected only by Google, we remember here some of the credit unions that called to order in 2011 their last board meetings.

Was it 650,000 or 440,000 or less than 250,000 as claimed by the bankers? I don't know and don't really care. But as Frank J. Diekmann recently commented, we should wish to eat this kind of crow again.

In today's market the challenge to earn reasonable returns on savings and retirement funds have brought about a renewed interest in a time-tested benefit plan.

Fair value measurements marked to internal models may satisfy auditors and regulators. But investors demand independent valuations of thinly traded securities to eliminate any appearance of conflicts of interest.

IMGCAP(1)]

Banks today find themselves in a strategic box as seemingly impenetrable as one of their vaults.

There's more confusion in the Obama administration's policy response to the foreclosure crisis than an Abbott and Costello routine. Now the Fed steps up to the plate.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Cordray's First Salvo: The day after his recess appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray vowed that the young agency "will make clear that there are real consequences to breaking the law." The bureau has several investigations underway, some inherited from other agencies, others that it initiated, he said. Some probes could end up being settled but others "may require enforcement actions." Cordray also dismissed doubts (expressed mostly by the administration's opponents) about the legality of the recess appointment and about the CFPB's right to police nonbanks without a Senate-confirmed director: "It's a valid appointment. I'm now the director of the bureau. … We now have our full authority to move forward." Indeed, the bureau has already begun supervising payday lenders, check cashers, and the like, he revealed. Republicans remained livid that President Obama bypassed the Senate, and business interests expressed fear of that old bogeyman: uncertainty. "We won't be sure what the rules are," the ABA's Wayne Abernathy told the Journal. "We'll know what Cordray wants the rules to be, but we won't know what they really are." Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post