IN EVERY CALAMITY, THERE IS OPPORTUNITY It’s hard to imagine a more bleak time to be in financial services. It seems like every day’s newspaper brings a fresh set of doom-and-gloom headlines, such as... - MidStates Bancorp reports record quarterly loss
- Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection
- Citicorp to lay off 25,000 workers
Discerning consumers, of course, have recognized that the problems have primarily been confined to investment banks and the national/global bancorps with substantial investment operations. It was mainly their managements that drank the KoolAid of sub-prime mortgages and their exotic derivative securities and credit-default swaps. Regional/community banks and credit unions, in contrast, by and large prudently chose not to put their depositors’ funds at undue risk and continued to make money the old-fashioned way: they earned it, by writing top-quality mortgages and business loans. They may have missed out on a couple of big earnings years at the top of the bubble, but that’s a small price to pay for not being on Federal life support today. In fact, we think that this scenario presents the smaller, local banks and CUs with a golden opportunity: to aggressively seek to take depositors and small-business customers away from the large national banks. Those customers ... Download PDF >> Read HTML Version >> |