PayThink

There is a management religion among credit union leaders today. Our faith lies in the numbers. When a decision is needed, to the financials we turn. Ratios, trends, analyses: accounting numbers rule the day.

A Human Resources vice president asked about strategies for re-educating the new "me" generation coming into the workplace.

NCUA's proper role in this suit should be as defendant. Their lack of oversight (despite being on site at WesCorp) clearly evidenced their lack of attentiveness to the activities of the management of the Corporate.

Institutional Risk Analytics, the firm that donated the search tool for the Huffington Post's Move Your Money campaign, weighed in on the debate over its chances for success. CEO and managing director Dennis Santiago pointed out in a blog post that shifting deposits out of big banks can make a "structural difference" to the financial system because checking and savings accounts have a bigger impact on the financial health of community banks.

In these recessionary times, we’ve noticed less expensive jewelry appearing under the Christmas tree. But maybe the best substitutes for gemstones are the credit cards once used to buy them

Does Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd's decision to retire help or hurt the odds of financial regulatory reform being enacted? Observers told the American Banker that it's a plus. The idea, espoused by American Bankers Association president and chief executive Edward Yingling and former Republican Sen. John Sununu, is that, with no campaign to run, Dodd is freer to focus on the legislation -- and his legacy. But others claim his lame-duck status could make moving legislation tougher

So far, more than two-thirds of respondents to our poll (at right) think big bank’s reputations have taken such a hit that customers either will or may follow the advice of the Huffington Post and shift their money to community banks. But Stuart Gunn, a partner at Bridge Strategy Group, a Chicago consultancy, has serious doubts.

Community bankers tend to lean to the right, but that doesn't mean they don't have fans on the left. The Huffington Post, a popular liberal Web site, is urging ordinary Americans to move their deposits out of large banks and into small, local banks that, as writers Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson put it, largely "avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of."

Steven Brill's account in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of how Washington's pay czar, Kenneith Feinberg, grappled with the question of how much to pay executives at companies that received billions in Tarp funds is an interesting read. But the 8,500-word article doesn't answer the question posed in the headline, "What's a Bailed-Out Banker Really Worth?"

After having had so much go wrong in the past year, it just seems fitting that so many folks are letting go with a sigh of relief that the "decade is over." without realizing they've got that wrong, too.