Maybe that Mayan calendar is right and the world will be ending shortly after the presidential election. You'd certainly think so by the furor of deck chair arranging going on in the banking industry. I'm told the buzz of the 2012 season of meetings is all about "Who's buying whom?"...

The FDIC shuttered four additional banks today bringing the 2012 count to seven. The four banks closed were BankEast in Knoxville, Tenn., Patriot Bank Minnesota in Forest Lake, Minn., Tennessee Commerce Bank in Franklin, Tenn. and First Guaranty Bank and Trust Company of Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Fla. The general pattern...

The FDIC closed it's first banks of 2012 today. A total of three insitutions were shuttered by the regulator. Central Florida State Bank of Belleview, Florida, The First State Bank of Stockbridge, Georgia and American Eagle Savings Bank of Boothwyn, Pennsylvannia each received the dreaded visit by FDIC teams to...

I wrote my annual missive on what bothers me the most about fixing the economy and published it today on the Institutional Risk Analytics website. I'm reprinting it here because I believe it is important that policy makers and presidential hopefuls pay greater attention to these issues. Our...

The City Administrative Officer (CAO) of the City of Los Angeles is proposing that Councilman Richard Alarcon's Responsible Banking Ordinance (RBO) be altered and adopted using much-changed implementation criteria from previous versions of the draft legislation.

On Monday November 21, 2011, the Budget and Finance Committee will meet to...

The politics of California are a minefield of self interests. Very few laws get passed here that, when examined in detail, do not lead back to someone hoping to make a mint by creating a monopoly advantage for a product or patent to lock competitors out of the market under...

One of the sad things about the state of the U.S. economic engine as it sits with the gearbox in neutral is that we seem unable to break so many bad habits. For decades, we have exported jobs by outsourcing first manufacturing and then services gaining cheap goods by ultimately...

The City of Los Angeles talks a great game about the "love in at the park" of its version of the Occupy movement. But clearly the old guard apparatus isn't yielding ground as fast as the rhetoric. I find it interesting that the city's administrators are implying the

What's happened to the Great Society? We've got a stagnant industrial economy where the unemployment rate among our youngest and oldest members of our workforce is dangerously high coupled with a financial system whose mark to market can best be described using the Mickey Mouse term "Imagineering". Our equities markets...

We received the 1st Quarter of 2011 research dataset from the FDIC at Institutional Risk Analytics yesterday. The computers churned the data overnight so our customers could begin to look at the surveillance analytics for their banks of interest this morning. I've been staring at the summary statistics...

What if too big to fail wasn't? What would you do? The U.S. economy's deposits, assets and risk instruments remain concentrated in a very small number of large institutions. What if one of them, just one of them collapsed? This is the question that keeps bank regulators and bank executives...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is the buck stops here office of U.S. bank regulation. Chairman Sheila Bair and company are the checkbook behind the sign on every bank's door sign guaranteeing that your deposit is FDIC insured. Funding America's Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is done by charging banks...

I was on Canadian network BNN last week. It is earnings time for banks and as much as I loathe talking about economic safety and soundness through the distorting lens of equities I attempted to field questions. It seems that "earnings per share" is looking better at some banks...

Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative...

Somewhere in the next 30 days, America will have a chance to attempt to open another path towards economic recovery. For the past year, Councilman Richard Alarcon has been leading the drive towards a municipal ordinance that directs his city to explore flexing its financial muscle to demand that bankers...

The days of the desktop or even laptop computer as a person's primary interface to the internet are numbered. The trend is to do more and more on the go on your telephone handset. Everything needs to re-cast itself onto these devices as terms like IPhone and Android replace PC...

"What if President Obama isn't actually triangulating towards the center? What if he has in fact been a practitioner of centrism all along? His administration's track record in years 1 and 2 speaks that pragmatism -- with its' many seemingly odd twists -- could very well be the White House's...

Six months after 9/11 on March 11, 2002 "Homeland Security Presidential Directive Three" created the color code threat system. Life in the United States has been Yellow ever since; Orange a good deal of the time around our air traffic system. We have altered our infrastructure to accept constant threat...

Bank regulators are holding hearings that could potentially improve the Community Reinvestment Act. The 1977 law was designed to ensure that banks remained connected to the communities they serve. Banking and finance have evolved significantly since that time, and the banking regulators have decided that it may be time to...

The acronym MENA stands for Mission Element Need Assessment. It's a document constructed to objectively assess if the self-interests of the United States are compelling enough to warrant the institution of a change to national policy or the initiation, continuation or termination of national action including, but not limited to,...