BankThink

Breaking News This Morning ...Barclays to Cut Jobs, Too: Following yesterday's announcement by fellow Londoner HSBC that it would fire as many as 30,000 people, Barclays said it intends to shed 3,000 jobs this year above and beyond the 1,400 the British bank eliminated in the first half. Barclays' first-half profit dropped by a third as it set aside money to compensate customers who bought dodgy payment protection insurance. Investment banking revenue declined as well. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times

Breaking News This Morning ...HSBC Earnings: The British bank said Monday it will cut up to 30,000 jobs and it reported a better-than-expected first-half profit. HSBC is selling 195 branches, mostly in upstate New York, to First Niagara (more on that below.) Wall Street Journal, New York Times

In a flat-fee model, most of the innovative energy goes into reducing costs rather than developing services that customers value.

There is new evidence against a suspected spokesman for the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec: Police say they found 750,000 passwords on his computer.

The proposed Qualified Residential Mortgage rules have a better chance at harming the housing market than they have at addressing underlying weaknesses in the securitization process. They are an overreaction to the excessive risk-taking during the housing boom.

Police attribute a rash of ATM crime to what they call the "Poison Ivy Fraud Ring."

It isn't very often you meet someone whose name is currently on a list of people the Taliban is seeking to kill. And yet one such person shared the story of his work and that of credit unions in Afghanistan.

Many CUs are asking a lot of "what-if" questions. While NCUA cannot answer these questions, as each CU's needs are its own, it can propose a few high-level questions to help decide whether the grass could be greener on the other side.

[The proposed QRM rule] is a horrible requirement for the home mortgage business. We certainly do not need to go back to poor lending habits, but we do need to have in place programs that allow people who CAN purchase a home do it.

I recently read how two CEOs tamed the IT beast in the June 26 issue of Credit Union Journal. Working for the largest credit union in Hawaii, I have been quite surprised by the lack of mature IT approaches in credit unions.