PayThink

Banks need to wake up and smell their burning coffee. Small business loan demand is weak but for reasons most banks refuse to admit to this day: unreasonable loan terms.

Let's be honest. By now, you'd think that faxing would be dead, a victim of all those killer apps, such as e-mail, texting and IM, that came after it. You would expect that the only place you'd see a fax or hear the screech of a fax transmission would be in a movie from the '80s, or at an exhibit at the Smithsonian. But you would be wrong.

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.