'Evil Things Happen': Comments of the Week
Published October 24, 2014 7:30 AM
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Updated October 23, 2014 9:49 PM
1 Min Read
American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and from our social media platforms.
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On the continuing debate over whether the government sweep of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits is unfair to the companies' shareholders:
"Let public be public and private private. Never mix them; evil things happen."
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On the merit of lawsuits brought against the government by shareholders of the government-sponsored enterprises:
"The poor souls who were sufficiently reckless to place their faith in any invention of Congress have only themselves to blame and should take counsel with a clergyman or a bartender. But for the investors in the GSEs to beg the courts or their fellow citizens for special dispensation is really too much."
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On the news that payments company and big-bank trade group The Clearing House plans to create a system for processing transactions in real time:
"Anyone else see the logic flaw in having the Too Big To Behave Banks build, own and operate the only real-time payments system in the country?
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On banks' efforts to court wary millennial customers:
"The question is which customers have most of the money? It's not the millennia. A balanced approach is needed."
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On concerns that Canada's spike in auto lending could put banks at risk in the event of an economic downturn:
"Elevated levels of household debt, significant increases in lending, assurances by banks that their standards are high and their models show there's no problem. What does that remind you of?"
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On the argument that mortgage borrowers with lower incomes and credit scores are not necessarily at a higher risk of default:
"When practices based on greed and prejudice are removed from mortgage lending, both the research and the real-life experience prove that low- and middle- income borrowers are equally as reliable as any other."
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On concerns that tight credit standards are hurting the housing recovery:
"This focus on relaxing underwriting standards to make more mortgages demonstrates that one of the first lessons to be forgotten from the mortgage mess that was allowed to explode into the financial crisis is that it is easy to get people into homes. It is much more difficult for them to stay there."
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On early reports that some customers are having trouble using Apple Pay:
"The confusion on the password comes as there can be at least three different iPhone passwordsthe screen password, the encryption password, the Apple Store password and perhaps an additional application password. It is going to be difficult to remember the right password when buying that first cup of coffee at 6 a.m. in the morning."
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On a characterization of President Obama's executive order, requiring government cards and facilities to use chip-and-PIN technology, as a "meaningless gesture":
"It's a bit tough to accuse the White House of 'too little too late' on this. Left to its own devices, the American payment industry has lagged the rest of the world by at least 10 years
Organic responses to fraud are notoriously slow if businesses mainly look at the issue in terms of profit and loss."
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On whether a country that has a large number of financial institutions is necessarily better off:
"There does not seem to be any correlation between the number of banks and a country's success so why should we care if the U.S. only has thousands of banks while Canada has five plus credit unions? There does seem to be a correlation between lack of regulation and bank crises. The US has had two major crises (S&L in 80s, Lehman recently) in the last 30 years, while Canada, which is more regulated, had none."
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