PayThink

With Congress' return came the reappearance of consumer advocates vying for lawmakers' attention. Codepink and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America arranged a couch and some chairs on the sidewalk outside the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill this morning to protest home foreclosures.

Whatever the Treasury Department's bailout is, it is not an experiment. Or so that's what Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson would have his audience believe.

New developments in the nascent regulation of credit-default swaps: Regulators announced an agreement Friday to share information about CDS clearinghouses, hoping to boost confidence that order was coming to the market despite an agency turf war.

Among life's little, often overlooked insights is just how small the difference can be between a good and a great idea.

Hell no, don´t let Sheila go!

Widely reported this week is the story of the Treasury Department´s sly tweaking of a tax rule that sweetened the deal for healthy banks buying failing ones. It´s not news (American Banker reported it October 6; the Wall Street Journal October 18), but fresh attention by the Washington Post and the Associated Press could whip up interest on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers are rolling up their sleeves this week with hearings in the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees designed to dig into the details of the adminstration´s rescue projects. On Wednesday, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., will hear testimony on loan modifications from Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase executives, as well as representatives from the securities industry.

Seven and a half years ago I attended a League Marketing Workshop. I had just started working at the credit union. I didn't have a single brochure, never done a promotion, nothing, nada, zip, zilch. As the first marketer of my credit union, I was charged with the task of creating it all from scratch. I was very young and, quite frankly, scared to death. It wasn't easy being green.

If you knew nothing of credit unions, would you take a morning or afternoon off to travel to an "Expo" and find out more?

President-elect Barack Obama may have defeated the politician most widely known as a pit-bull, but his new White House chief of staff has also garnered the reference in the past.