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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Credit unions are in Washington this week for CUNA’s GAC looking to talk politics, but they’ll likely find themselves fielding a few questions about their own balance sheets.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Buffeted by several large credit union failures, NCUA said the National CU Share Insurance Fund lost $185.4 million in December, the most losses for one month or for an entire year in the fund’s existence.

MADISON, Wis. - Measuring a credit union’s performance against another “high-performing” credit union raises a difficult question: what is a high-performing CU?

ARLINGTON, Va. — When Leap Year was created, the goal was to get the seasons to line up with the calendar and ensure everyone was celebrating Easter at the same time. But the Feb. 29 Leap Day this week will also have a small but measurable effect on credit union balance sheets.

WASHINGTON - Senior members of the House Financial Services Committee called on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to help inject liquidity in the student loan market just as the liquidity crisis appears to be seizing up the secondary market for student loans.

WASHINGTON - The rapid build-up in credit union liquidity raised credit union investments in the Trust for Credit Unions Money Market Portfolio to $1.047 billion earlier this month, up $687 million from the previous year, according to Callahan Financial Services, a subsidiary of Callahan & Associates.

VERNON HILLS, Ill. -

TOPEKA, Kan. -

ORLANDO, Fla. -

MADISON, Wis. - Credit unions closed out 2007 with loan growth exceeding savings growth and the loan-to-share ratio rising to 84.6% from 83.9% one month earlier, according to data released by CUNA.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - NCUA said last week it has added full-time examiners and is conducting additional supervision to some credit unions in the face of huge losses being reported for 2007.

ORLANDO - How are credit unions going to differentiate themselves from other financial institutions in a way that will boost household and market penetration in 2008?

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Credit unions moved billions of additional dollars into their loan-loss reserves in the fourth quarter, creating some of the biggest losses in the history of the industry, according to preliminary fourth quarter data submitted to NCUA.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Credit unions seeking to grow have no choice but to look to new and different sources of fuel for that growth, and that’s where REAL Solutions says comes in.

NEW YORK - More than 405,000 households were foreclosed upon during 2007, a whopping 51% increase over the 268,532 homes foreclosed upon in 2006, according to new data. During December 2007, foreclosure filings were up 97%, according to RealtyTrac, an online seller of properties in foreclosure.

WASHINGTON - It was inevitable that in lifting some of the weight off of consumers last week the Federal Reserve would squeeze credit unions and banks even more with its unexpected 75 basis-point cut in short-term interest rates.

WASHINGTON - Credit union economists are still loathe to use the dreaded “R” word, but they are ready with advice on just what it could mean for CUs if the nation slips into a recession.

Figuring out the direction of interest rates is a daunting task. You cannot press a button on a mathematical model and get the answer. Interest rates are historic phenomena. They depend crucially on forces peculiar to the economy at the time. Interest rates hit modern highs in 1981 because Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker needed to turn the corner on double-digit inflation. Tight money did the trick. Interest rates hit multi-decade lows in 2003 as Chairman Alan Greenspan eased monetary policy to take out insurance against a Japanese style deflation. Today the economy is in a wholly different configuration. The largest housing bubble in U.S. history has burst, with serious repercussions for credit markets and economic growth. A credit crunch of indeterminate proportions is underway. The cat of falling interest rates is out of the bag.

MADISON, Wis. - Loan delinquencies continued to rise for credit unions, with the average delinquency ratio moving up to 0.89% for November, the highest in almost a decade, according to CUNA.

WASHINGTON - The “doom and gloom” being seen and discussed elsewhere is actually “great” for credit unions.