BankThink

I enjoyed reading Frank Diekmann's column in the Jan. 12 issue; the prose is almost poetic.

While the NCUA is definitely a "government agency," I believe it would be in the best interest of the credit union movement that Credit Union Journal refrain from using the words "government rescue" and "bailout" in the same sentence. In fact, I believe an article explaining that this bailout is not coming from taxpayer dollars would be in order.

I just got Credit Union Journal's tribute issue to the 100th anniversary of credit unions (Jan. 12), and I loved Frank Diekmann's views and opinion column - not not quite as stirring as Obama's speech - but hey it came close!

The reality is that fraud happens. On average, credit card issuers experience approximately six basis points of loss every year ($600 per $1 million in charge volume), which is low compared to the 18 basis-point peak in the early 1990s. The annual cost to U.S. issuers is estimated to be $1 billion.

In the fall of 1984, 16 acquaintances from Illinois decided they deserved a break from their hard work with a golf trip to Biloxi, Miss. The group departed on their excursion on March 8, 1985 in two motor homes. The 16 consisted of 11 credit union CEOs, an advertising salesman, the owner of a marketing firm, a board chairman, a retired ICUL Service Corp. vice president, and a vice president from our corporate credit union. What transpired from the first trip was amazing. During that week, a network of friendship, cooperation and mutual respect was established that grew into something special. Since then, more than 60 people have participated in one or more of the trips, with no fewer than 16 participants or more than 24 in a given year. Due to the fact that the first 12 excursions were to Biloxi, Miss., those who attended are known as the "Biloxi Boys."

Several years ago a member stopped me in the lobby of the our Dover Air Force Base Branch to thank me. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, because he asked if I remembered him, and I did not. He told me that 10 years prior to this I had "saved his life."

Every time there is a catastrophic storm or event, it is invariably labled a "once-a-century" occurrence. That such events seem to occur every few years never seems to throw any water on application of the "once-a-century" hyperbole.

There´s a new feature on the Center for Responsible Lending´s Website: A ticker counting foreclosures. The CRL claims a new foreclosure occurs once every 13 seconds. The ticker is housed in a big red box on the upper left hand corner of the page and it is counting the foreclosures since Jan. 1. As I write this, the count is around 237,000.

A new Supreme Court case set to be heard this spring will revisit the much-pondered issue of preemption, but Consumers Union has taken the quest for states rights to enforce laws against national banks a step further. In a letter this week to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Consumers Union asks the Treasury to repeal preemption rules issued in 2004 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The Financial Services Roundtable has plunged into the fray of financial firms competing to demonstrate to a weary Nation that they have made the best possible use of the bailout funds they received from taxpayers. FSR has come in swinging for large-ish and medium-sized banks, with President Steve Bartlett declaring in a press release that "The media reports suggesting that banks aren´t lending despite the injection of TARP funds are painting an unfairly gloomy report."