PayThink

The idea that necessity is the mother of innovation may generally be more popular with Wall Street scions than state regulators, but in Massachusetts last week the tables turned.

This week the Senate will take up the credit card bill that the House of Representatives passed on May 1. With the stress test results now public, it´s possible that new capital raising initiatives could be announced by the banks we now know need to add to their buffers. There´s official reason for immediacy; the deadline for a capital raising plan isn´t until next month. But some would take the view that the quicker a capital raising plan is announced, the stronger the bank appears to be. We wouldn´t rule out a grand unveiling or two in the coming weeks.

There´s a reason why this week might have seemed even more surreal than usual to people in the financial world. As nervous anticipation of the stress test results gathered force, the whole earth seemed to be turning on a fixed point in time: 5pm on Thursday, May 7, the date the Treasury Department had set for its release of the stress test results. With so much attention focused on that event, it was disorienting to awake each morning to an array of major daily papers casting and recasting it with scoops, almost scoops and not-quite-news. How many banks will fail the test now? How much more capital is needed? Every morning was different and yet the format was the same, like a twisted variation on Groundhog Day.

What if you could develop a simple and low-cost method to effectively reduce robberies and fraud, and enhance the member and staff branch experience at the same time? What if a new security methodology could actually support and promote a credit union's branding and cultural initiatives and deliver higher ROI at the same time?

There are deal-breakers and back-breakers, and then there is the question raised by the Senate passage of legislation to allow NCUA to stretch out the costs of the corporate CU bailout for as long as eight years-will it be the ice breaker?

Research is an income generator. Research is an expense minimizer. And research is a key tool to help you grow. [No, I'm not smoking any funny stuff. Really] Read on.

It has taken me three days to respond to your April 27, 2009 article titled "FIs Won't Do Well on Treasury 'Stress Test'." I must be an idiot because I do not see the validity of these comments as it relates to my credit union!

With the unpredictable financial markets, credit unions are poised to significantly grow their share of residential mortgage lending activity in 2009. In the past, borrowers were bombarded with telemarketing calls, junk mail, and TV advertising from brokers and retail lenders. Today, however, that "noise" is getting quieter, and borrowers are growing wary of working with big banks and mortgage lenders in the wake of the current market volatility.

The Senate Banking Committee is holding a hearing on how to regulate institutions that are too big to fail. The first panel, on which Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chariman Sheila Bair and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Gary Stern testified, addressed the timing and composition of a systemic resolution authority. Now the second group of witnesses has assembled at the table.

This morning witnesses from federal bank regulatory agencies and from academia will take questions from the Senate Banking Committee on ways to regulate "too big to fail" institutions. Committee members have recently expressed wariness over the Federal Reserve's ability to handle a job as a systemic risk monitor, and today's hearing should further illuminate the committee's intentions to address the regulation of systemically important firms.