PayThink

What few in credit unions ever seem to notice is that they are as much a part of the employers-reluctant-to-hire picture as everyone else.

"Hey diddle, diddle" to the seven Western natural-person credit unions that got the lawsuit against WesCorp started in November 2009, naming the officers and directors, but clearly targeting NCUA in their complaint.

It is time to clean house so credit unions can move on. What makes some of these executives believe they are above this problem?

Gather a group of financial industry experts and analysts around a table and there will be a gigabyte or more of opinions and predictions. But as one such recent roundtable showed, today those opinions and predictions carry with them any number of attachments in the form of asterisks and caveats.

Effective change requires applying fundamental principles. My doctoral research on successful organizations internationally suggests four such keys:.

I believe Fred Becker made some thought-provoking comments about the need for all of us in the credit union community to stay close to our cooperative roots and pay attention to what our industry colleagues are doing. But I disagree that credit unions, as a whole, have "forgotten we are a cooperative community."

The revelations about having to find a place to put all the "new hires" underlines a need to move quickly to fold NCUA's tent and have FDIC assume the role of regulator for CUs.

Media coverage of the tragic plane crash that took the life of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens focused on his long career in the U.S. Senate, the circumstances surrounding his departure, and on the recovery efforts to reach survivors who spent the night in a remote, rugged area of the Last Frontier.

Re: "Fannie Mae Announces Changes to Appraisal Process." While we trust that many refinance and purchase transactions have been scuttled because appraisers could not find enough comparable sales, the reality is that many of experienced yet unqualified appraisers were asked to do an appraisal that was beyond their capabilities.

If only we had watched our expenses more carefully. If only we had paid closer attention to members' changing credit scores. If only, and this is the big one, we had not invested in the corporates.