PayThink

Andrew Kahr blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's affordable housing goals for helping "inflate" the housing bubble. Former GOP appointees at HUD see it differently.

A federal charter will allow lenders to provide more credit alternatives with lower costs as well as flexible payback periods and loan amounts to underbanked consumers.

The SEC has a lot of rules to implement for Dodd-Frank, and as we know, much of that has been slow-going. The agency had been posting a timetable for action on its website, but "this summer, the agency quietly removed timing estimates from its list of pending Dodd-Frank mandates, largely because the estimates were rarely accurate, officials said," reports a Wall Street Journal blog.

The theme of many Dodd-Frank two-year anniversary articles this summer was all about how many rules required by the legislation were still up in the air. That might be about to change.

Every consumer should have access to a low-cost, full service bank account that helps them make necessary payments, manage cash flow and avoid ancillary fees.

A simpler calculation isn't necessarily the right one. If a capital ratio misrepresents a bank's risk or creates incentives to take on more of it, simple is scarcely an improvement.

While deposit-driven financial institutions, at best, could use small-dollar loans to bring in customers who would later purchase other products, installment lenders have been successfully serving underserved communities for close to 100 years.

We can only speculate about the real purpose for the Volcker Rule.

Adopting universal terminology will allow financial institutions to quickly identify, understand and share information about threats, plan for different scenarios and build the systems required to effectively defend their interests.

The board of directors must anticipate the unexpected and quickly execute strategic alternatives when a problem arises, regardless of its severity. Failure to do so could land their financial institution on the FDIC's problem list.