PayThink

As the United States commemorates the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack, the financial community, among many others, is taking time to reflect on those lost. We should also remember how difficult it must be for their surviving families.

Stanford University's hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., is offering identity theft protection to 20,000 patients after discovering that their personal information was visible online for almost a year.

August was a difficult month for bank stocks. The KBW bank index fell at one time during the month by over 20% before recovering to a month-end 13.4% decline. This pattern has been consistent for bank stocks, which have retreated from their April highs due to the return of macroeconomic concerns. The KBW index is down 23.1% while the broader S&P 500 is only off 3.7%, year-to-date.

Seventy percent of healthcare organizations report that they have exposed personal information in the past 12 months. Most of the information was exposed by nosy employees.

Foreclosures continue to decimate communities around the nation, with black neighborhoods being the hardest hit. Some pundits and politicians point to federal policies that encouraged homeownership in low- and moderate-income communities, coupled with reckless behavior on the part of greedy homeowners, as the crux of the problem. One example is the statement by Fox News reporter Neil Cavuto that "loaning to minorities and risky borrowers is a disaster." To the contrary, our recent research demonstrates that it is outside investors living in other, predominantly white neighborhoods, not local homeowners, who account for the adverse impact on our nation's black communities.

President Obama should acknowledge that something is seriously wrong with the government's response to the financial crisis of 2008 and chart a new course. The wisdom in comic strip legend Pogo's famous remark comes to mind, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

In the 1980s Freddie Mac had a marketing campaign "The Gnomes Know," touting their expertise in mortgage markets. Now the Federal Housing Finance Agency has filed a $200 billion lawsuit against 17 of the nation's largest mortgage lenders arguing that during the subprime lending debacle of the last decade the gnomes didn't know!

Is it worth delaying a bottoming-out of the housing market, and allowing some delinquent borrowers to freeload for a time, in order to prevent the rare but documented instances of someone being wrongly foreclosed on?

Major tech companies are assessing the scope of the recently disclosed July breach of digital certificates, which Web browsers use to verify the legitimacy of any sites they display to users.

Core banking purchases have stayed level, vendors systems are getting better and overall things are not as bad as they might seem.