BankThink

So far, more than two-thirds of respondents to our poll (at right) think big bank’s reputations have taken such a hit that customers either will or may follow the advice of the Huffington Post and shift their money to community banks. But Stuart Gunn, a partner at Bridge Strategy Group, a Chicago consultancy, has serious doubts.

Community bankers tend to lean to the right, but that doesn't mean they don't have fans on the left. The Huffington Post, a popular liberal Web site, is urging ordinary Americans to move their deposits out of large banks and into small, local banks that, as writers Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson put it, largely "avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of."

Steven Brill's account in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of how Washington's pay czar, Kenneith Feinberg, grappled with the question of how much to pay executives at companies that received billions in Tarp funds is an interesting read. But the 8,500-word article doesn't answer the question posed in the headline, "What's a Bailed-Out Banker Really Worth?"

After having had so much go wrong in the past year, it just seems fitting that so many folks are letting go with a sigh of relief that the "decade is over." without realizing they've got that wrong, too.

President Obama promised to change the culture in Washington. Yet, in this entire financial crisis, the Administration has made only one effort to appoint a new depository institution regulator: Deborah Matz.

While we must adhere to our fundamental values, we can find new ways to promote them. Social media or other new technology may afford many credit unions the perfect way to reach out to existing and new members.

Being lectured on economic policy by the Chinese is like being called ugly by a frog. And yet there was Liu Minkang, Chairman of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission, calling American fiscal and monetary policy a threat to the global economy last month on the eve of President Obama’s first visit to Beijing.

In addition to tempting fate with his assertion that neither foreclosures, bad commercial real estate loans nor high unemployment would send the economy back into freefall, Geithner also appeared to contradict himself on the reasons for a contraction in commercial lending.

The Harvard Business Review’s January-February issue presents a provocative idea: the financial sector should use a "military approach" to keeping the economy safe.

The Harvard Business Review has ranked the 100 best CEOs of large, public companies in the world based on performance over their entire time in office. (Or, for those still on the job, up to Sept. 30, 2009.) It features just three U.S. bankers.