Credit unions

WASHINGTON – CUNA has proposed a corporate aid plan to NCUA which would provide additional guarantees of corporate deposits beyond the current $250,000 per account provided by the National CU Share Insurance Fund.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.-Strapped for liquidity as paper losses grow on their asset-backed securities, the corporate credit unions have proposed a comprehensive restructuring of the system that would provide additional sources of funds, boost capital and position the corporates as providers of new services to natural-person credit unions.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – NCUA said the initial offering of the CU System Investment Program, aimed at pumping new liquidity into a handful of corporate credit unions, will result in $4.9 billion being provided to two corporates, U.S. Central FCU and WesCorp FCU, this Friday.

NORWALK, Conn. – The Financial Accounting Standards Board voted yesterday to change guidance for accounting for impaired securities so that preparers of financial statements may rely more on expected cash flows, rather than the current distressed market values, when assessing the fair market value for their investments.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A comprehensive rescue plan submitted by the corporate credit union network to NCUA proposes that the emergency lending fund known as the Central Liquidity Facility be used to pump as much as $15 billion of new funds into the corporates or even be utilized to move billions of dollars of distressed assets off the corporates’s books.

NORWALK, Conn. – The Financial Accounting Standards Board is expected to offer some relief today to corporate credit unions and banks with large holdings of impaired securities by changing some of the rules for fair value, also known as mark-to-market accounting.

WASHINGTON – Rejecting a bid by corporate credit unions and other financial institutions, the Securities and Exchange Commission last week recommended against suspending fair value accounting, which is causing those institutions to report billions of dollars in unrealized losses on underwater assets.

DALLAS – Unrealized losses on the vast securities portfolios of corporate credit unions continue to grow with two more corporates, Southwest Corporate FCU and Corporate One FCU, reporting additional mark-downs for November, and just as important, each deciding to realize some of the growing losses on their books.

WALL STREET – Growing losses within the corporate network caused Moody’s Investors Service to cut its ratings yesterday on several of the biggest corporate credit unions, including U.S. Central FCU and WesCorp FCU.

WARRENVILLE, Ill. – Corporate credit unions are reporting hundreds of millions of new losses on their books, the direct result of last month’s decision by the Treasury Department to abandon its plans to buy illiquid assets from financial institutions.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The plunging markets for securities held by corporate credit unions has left NCUA between a rock and a hard place as it seeks to minimize potential losses among the corporate network.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.-NCUA moved last week to aid the corporate credit unions, which are struggling to cope with rising unrealized losses on their investment portfolios, by providing them with a back-door to the agency's emergency loan fund, known as the Central Liquidity Facility.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Viewpointe, the national check and image exchange owned by a handful of large banks, said yesterday that Southeast Corporate FCU has signed to become its first Pointe2Pointe Internet connectivity customer.

WESTMINISTER, Colo. – The proposed merger of SunCorp FCU into the much larger WesCorp FCU, one of a handful of corporate combinations hatched in 2007, continues to linger with NCUA, as investment losses continue to pile up at the two corporates.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Even with NCUA’s new plan to add liquidity to the troubled corporate credit union network, there are no illusions that the plan, the so-called CU System Investment Program, will solve the corporates’ ills, unrealized losses on their investments of more than $14 billion–and growing.

LENEXA, Kan.-U.S. Central FCU reported the spreading credit crisis tainted more of its asset backed securities in October, pushing unrealized losses on its vast investment portfolio up by another $1 billion, to a total of $7.3 billion.

SAN DIMAS, Calif. – WesCorp FCU reported yesterday a new methodology for calculating the values of its assets helped trim unrealized losses on its investment portfolio slightly at the end of October to $1.7 billion, from $1.8 billion the month before, but the western corporate also warned of potential losses on troubled collateralized debt obligations, known as CDOs.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.-The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) last Tuesday posted its list of 26 corporate credit unions that are participating in the agency's Temporary Corporate CU Liquidity Guarantee Program (TCCULGP).

DALLAS - During Southwest Corporate's Economic Forum here, Credit Union Journal asked attendees: How has the credit crisis directly affected your CU? What about your lending volume? Answers varied widely depending on the responder's local market.

DALLAS - CUNA's Chief Economist Bill Hampel is offering up these predictions for credit unions through the end of 2009: