Financial journalists sometimes refer to M&A bankers as "rainmakers." Do they make it rain, or do they just take credit when it starts raining?

Old Line Bancshares in Bowie, Md., has appointed Mark Semanie as its chief operating officer to help manage its recent growth.

The U.S. government has charged an Illinois man with overstating by hundreds of thousands of dollars the value of collateral he used to secure loans from a bank that received funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Chicago-area company has started financing employee stock-ownership plans as a way to eke more business out of commercial clients.

A combination of low yields and loosening terms may be setting banks up for trouble in the event of an economic downturn, one of the nation's top credit ratings agencies said Monday.

Bankers truly face a Catch-22 in the lending business these days, thanks to "qualified mortgage" and disparate impact laws.

Hudson Valley Holding Corp. in Yonkers, N.Y. , has named Michael Indiveri its chief financial officer.

Regions Financial has wrapped up a tender offer to lower its debt expense. The company said Monday that it plans to retire $350 million worth of 2014 bonds on which it pays a 7.75% interest rate.

First Merchants is buying CFS Bancorp in a deal that would create a $5.6 billion-asset Indiana bank.

Institutions with at least $10 billion of assets approved 16.8% of loans between $25,000 and $3 million in April, up from 15.7% in March and 10.6% a year earlier, according to an index published Friday by Biz2Credit.

The gradual erosion of net interest margins and a compensatory shift toward risky new lending strategies for additional yield is a major factor for high chargeoffs and community bank failures.

JPMorgan Chase's leading directors urged shareholders to reject calls for Jamie Dimon to relinquish his dual role as chairman and chief executive officer, saying it "could be disruptive" and against the best interests of investors.

Regulators on Friday seized two banks owned by the $1.6 billion-asset company. The failures could tangle the Lansing, Mich., company in what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. calls the cross-guarantee liability, meaning that the agency has the ability to charge Capitol's nine surviving banks with the cost of the failures.

BankUnited handed out free ice cream and metro cards at its new Manhattan branches to build branch recognition.

A North Carolina bank that had belonged to the long-troubled Capitol Bancorp was closed by state regulators on Friday.

New York's Attorney General charged Bank of America and Wells Fargo with hundreds of cases of failure to comply with the national mortgage servicing settlement recently. The claims made for lots headlines but may prove a non-starter in court.

First NBC Bank Holdings in New Orleans is looking to sell $100 million worth of shares in its initial public offering.

Customers Bancorp in Wyomissing, Pa., is looking to raise $75 million in a stock sale and intends to use the proceeds to fund organic growth and acquisitions.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Shares of TriState Capital (TSC) in Pittsburgh rose slightly during their first day of trading.