Cathay General Bancorp in Los Angeles has entered into option agreements to buy a 41% stake in the $307 million-asset Great Eastern Bank in New York City for about $28.4 million.

Hurricane Katrina did not drop much rain on the Plains states, but farmers there are feeling the storm’s aftereffects.

After going nearly three years without making an acquisition, First State Bancorp of Albuquerque has announced two deals in less than a week.

New Collateral Rules Expected to Boost Lending

Despite bankers’ repeated complaints about excessive regulation, many of them are actually doing more than is required of them in corporate governance.

Daryl G. Byrd, the president and chief executive of Iberiabank Corp. of Lafayette, La., said he expects Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and other cities near New Orleans to grow fast as families and businesses displaced by Hurricane Katrina begin to rebuild.

Whitney Holding Corp. of New Orleans has moved senior managers to Houston and started reopening branches in areas hit by Hurricane Katrina.

A pioneer of the super community banking structure, Financial Institutions Inc. in Warsaw, N.Y., is consolidating its four bank subsidiaries to cut costs and get a better grip on the internal-control and credit-quality problems that have dogged it for the past three years.

First State Bancorp in Albuquerque is buying the $374 million-asset Access Anytime Bancorp, also of Albuquerque, for about $30 million in stock. In addition to building itself in New Mexico, the $2 billion-asset First State would enter Arizona by acquiring Access Anytime, whose lone branch there is in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City.

Are federal regulators unfairly targeting south Florida community banks in their crackdown on money laundering?

Community bankers are keeping their fingers crossed that the Securities and Exchange Commission will give them an extra year to comply with the internal-controls provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

ABC Bancorp, a multibank holding company in Moultrie, Ga., plans to consolidate its 12 banks under a single charter and adopt a new name. The $1.3 billion-asset company said Wednesday that it has hired a marketing firm to help it create the name, which it plans to unveil next quarter. ABC estimates that the consolidation and rebranding will cost about $1.7 million.

MIDDLE ATLANTIC

The National Credit Union Administration has agreed to let two Texas credit unions convert to mutual thrifts in exchange for dropping their legal claims against the regulator.

Gary Kohn, the senior legislative counsel for the Credit Union National Association, says he received a piece of advice from Senate aides a week or so ago: don't bring up the topic of credit union-to-bank conversions during any regulatory-relief hearings.

Even for a company as expansion-minded as Capitol Bancorp Inc. of Lansing, Mich., 2005 has been an extraordinarily busy year.

Dozens of bank branches in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were severely damaged by wind and flooding and hundreds more were still without power a day after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast.

As Interchange Financial Services Corp. of Saddle Brook, N.J., and its largest shareholder, the activist investor Lawrence B. Seidman, continue to attack each other, predicted improvement in its performance may resolve the conflict.