The Independent Community Bankers of America is lobbying for broader participation in Emergency Economic Stabilization Act programs. While commending the government’s efforts, ICBA chairman (and Bank of the West vice chairman and COO) Cynthia L. Blankenship told members of the House Committee on Financial Services last week that the ICBA “has significant concerns with the pace of implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s Capital Purchase Program.”
The CPP’s term sheet “will just not work for the many privately held banks, thinly traded banks, Subchapter S banks and mutual institutions because of statutory constraints and organizational structures peculiar to each of these types of institutions,” Blankenship testified. Not only that: banks are “rightly concerned about a provision in the CPP agreement that will allow the government to retroactively change any of the contract terms of the established Securities Purchase Agreement should there be a change to a federal statute.” The ICBA recommends that this “provision be modified to say that only future changes to federal law that apply to all financial institutions, not those directly solely at institutions participating in the CPP program, could be incorporated retroactively into the agreement,” Blankenship told committee members.
