PayThink

Banks' defense against litigation over the sale of bad mortgage-backed securities to Fannie and Freddie hinges on the unseemly idea that it is unreasonable to assume that the world's largest banks would comply with the Securities Act of 1933.

In a final rule meant to limit the systemic effects of company failures, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. defined which financial firms are subject to Dodd-Frank resolutions.

American Banker's Editor-at-Large Barbara Rehm explains why the next 18 months are critical to the financial industry and why federal regulators must finish the majority of Dodd-Frank provisions by the end of 2014.

To survive, Bitcoin businesses will have to do more than "de-anonymize" their operations. They will also have to cope with the loss of the digital currency’s most fundamental characteristic: irrevocability.

While face-to-face interactions may be nowhere near the most common banking transaction these days, they continue to have an inordinate influence on how customers think and feel about a bank. We cannot afford to waste them.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council voted to identify an initial group of nonbank firms as potential threats to financial stability. Under the Dodd-Frank reform law, the FSOC has the responsibility to name several nonbank financial companies as systemically risky.

Let’s be cautious about scrapping the Camels rating system without fully understanding why it supposedly failed. Any human endeavor is prone to failure, as any system is subject to improvement.

The trend is decidedly away from shared roles and to a separation of the board from management.

Brown-Vitter is a welcome display of bipartisanship. But its proposed solution to “too big to fail,” equity capital, is only marginally effective in imposing discipline on management.

The FDIC's decision to fund its emergency needs by calling upon banks to prepay future premiums back in 2009 suggests that the line to the Treasury may never be used.