PayThink

In the fall of 1984, 16 acquaintances from Illinois decided they deserved a break from their hard work with a golf trip to Biloxi, Miss. The group departed on their excursion on March 8, 1985 in two motor homes. The 16 consisted of 11 credit union CEOs, an advertising salesman, the owner of a marketing firm, a board chairman, a retired ICUL Service Corp. vice president, and a vice president from our corporate credit union. What transpired from the first trip was amazing. During that week, a network of friendship, cooperation and mutual respect was established that grew into something special. Since then, more than 60 people have participated in one or more of the trips, with no fewer than 16 participants or more than 24 in a given year. Due to the fact that the first 12 excursions were to Biloxi, Miss., those who attended are known as the "Biloxi Boys."

Several years ago a member stopped me in the lobby of the our Dover Air Force Base Branch to thank me. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, because he asked if I remembered him, and I did not. He told me that 10 years prior to this I had "saved his life."

Every time there is a catastrophic storm or event, it is invariably labled a "once-a-century" occurrence. That such events seem to occur every few years never seems to throw any water on application of the "once-a-century" hyperbole.

There´s a new feature on the Center for Responsible Lending´s Website: A ticker counting foreclosures. The CRL claims a new foreclosure occurs once every 13 seconds. The ticker is housed in a big red box on the upper left hand corner of the page and it is counting the foreclosures since Jan. 1. As I write this, the count is around 237,000.

A new Supreme Court case set to be heard this spring will revisit the much-pondered issue of preemption, but Consumers Union has taken the quest for states rights to enforce laws against national banks a step further. In a letter this week to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Consumers Union asks the Treasury to repeal preemption rules issued in 2004 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The Financial Services Roundtable has plunged into the fray of financial firms competing to demonstrate to a weary Nation that they have made the best possible use of the bailout funds they received from taxpayers. FSR has come in swinging for large-ish and medium-sized banks, with President Steve Bartlett declaring in a press release that "The media reports suggesting that banks aren´t lending despite the injection of TARP funds are painting an unfairly gloomy report."

Finally, a working example of the public and private sectors cooperating to address this whole asset backed securities thing: JPMorgan Chase revealed today that it had been selected to run a program through which Federal Reserve will buy mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.

The nation´s banks have overextended themselves with questionable loans in a time of easy credit, and their balance sheets are a mess. The federal government has been slow to react to the problem, and its first solution of a voluntary pool to loan money to troubled banks has not worked. Manufacturers´ woes in Detroit threaten to spread and undermine confidence in the banking system. Some policymakers are advocating for a temporary nationalization of the banking system while others argue that no matter how bad it may seem at present, market solutions will provide better and more stable long-term solutions. It's probably not what you think--this is a historical snapshot from 1933.

More often than not, remakes of classic American films flop, and Citigroup´s dramatic do-over of The Incredible Shrinking Man may be no exception.

This week is a week of talking and talking and talking about the financial crisis and how to fix it. Two versions of a stimulus bill now exist and must be reconciled as they circulate Congress. Meanwhile, the first soft notes of regulatory restructuring will sound, and lawmakers will face off over what the rapidly dwindling Tarp program should really accomplish.