BankThink

Who knew that killing bankers could be so hard on the hands? Between throwing them into the air, blowing them up, shooting them down and shaking them so hard their clothes fall off, it’s easy for your fingers to get a little cramped now and again. Especially when you kill so many.

Matthew Miller, the man who lost more than $1,400 to Chase in a puzzling series of overdraft fees last month has written to BankThink with an update, which we wanted to share with our readers.

Check out this post on the financial blog Naked Capitalism describing an off-the-record meeting the Treasury Department arranged between senior officials and financial bloggers. The Treasury has, along with other heavily scrutinized agencies within the Obama administration, gotten into the habit of trying to make nice with journalists by inviting small groups for a chat on the condition that they do not quote individual officials. Other financial regulatory agencies have held meetings that are so far off the record they aren’t even allowed to be mentioned. The benefit of these events remains unclear. Naked Capitalism blogger Yves Smith makes a point about their futility:

Over at the Huffington Post today, reporter Arthur Delaney walked readers through the case of a former Washington Mutual customer whose account converted to Chase Bank when JPMorgan Chase & Co. bought the failed thrift late last year. The customer, Matthew Miller, recently discovered he’d been charged a total of $1,446 in overdraft fees during the course of a month.

Tucked into stories of Friday’s failure of the nine subsidiaries of FBOP is evidence of a clash of government agencies that seems at first to have had a very unfortunate outcome.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but as a number of readers were all quick to point out, it can come at a pretty good discount.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a merger should be completed as quickly and painlessly as possible. This approach is neither logical nor prudent.

Converting systems and vendors of the merging credit union to those of the continuing credit union concurrent with execution of the merger is not generally the best course of action. There is no requirement to tie the two events together and there are several reasons to treat them independently.

Mystery shopping services do have a place; it's just that they are asked to serve a purpose they do not serve well. And better solutions exist.

Most of the action this week will be in the House Financial Services Committee, where Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., will continue marking up new financial regulatory legislation. The Senate Banking Committee has exactly zero banking-related events scheduled, and the Treasury Department is off the hook for reg reform deadlines for the moment.