PayThink

Tucked into stories of Friday’s failure of the nine subsidiaries of FBOP is evidence of a clash of government agencies that seems at first to have had a very unfortunate outcome.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but as a number of readers were all quick to point out, it can come at a pretty good discount.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a merger should be completed as quickly and painlessly as possible. This approach is neither logical nor prudent.

Converting systems and vendors of the merging credit union to those of the continuing credit union concurrent with execution of the merger is not generally the best course of action. There is no requirement to tie the two events together and there are several reasons to treat them independently.

Mystery shopping services do have a place; it's just that they are asked to serve a purpose they do not serve well. And better solutions exist.

Most of the action this week will be in the House Financial Services Committee, where Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., will continue marking up new financial regulatory legislation. The Senate Banking Committee has exactly zero banking-related events scheduled, and the Treasury Department is off the hook for reg reform deadlines for the moment.

Six months ago, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that dictated strict separation between commercial and investment banks, was out of fashion, with only commentators on the far left advocating for its revival. But how quickly tides of favor can turn: Now it’s becoming mainstream.

They say true compromise is achieved when nobody’s happy. In the case of financial regulatory reform, that doesn’t mean that nobody’s laughing.

There’s a detail in the Seattle Times’ exhaustive series on Washington Mutual’s mortgage lending practices that’s too darkly funny to go unnoticed. The four stories focus on the Seattle thrift’s journey down the dark path of low-documentation lending and risky products, such as adjustable-rate mortgages. At one point, WaMu even made a low-doc loan to O.J. Simpson. Yes, that O.J. Simpson.

I would suspect most credit union CEOs and senior managers feel there's no need to enroll in college again; if anything, they should be teaching a new generation about all the credits they have compiled in the School of Hard Knocks this year.