By Bill Poquette, Editor-in-Chief
Sept. 15, 2018, marked the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest and venerated U.S. investment bank that Fortune magazine had labeled a year earlier the No. 1 “most admired securities firm.” A primary cause for the debacle, which was to become a stark symbol of the financial crisis, was imprudent lending amidst the housing bubble.
Last August in this space, I wrote about a speech by Acting Comptroller of the Currency Keith Noreika in mid-July strongly defending the agency’s proposal for special-purpose national charters for fintech companies offering banking or bank-like services. This was a few weeks after the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the New York Department of Financial services filed lawsuits — which were subsequently dismissed as premature — charging the OCC lacked legal grounds for such charters.
By Bill Poquette, Editor-in-Chief
Maybe it’s the weather. The central part of the country has been sweltering since May, and a couple of big-ticket bank acquisitions in Chicago and Denver seem to suggest a warming-up of merger activity and pricing.
By Bill Poquette, Editor-in-Chief
As is common when bankers gather for their annual meetings, there were touches of penetrating economic insight from the podium at the Missouri Bankers Association convention June 13-15 at Tan-Tar-A Resort in Osage Beach beside the Lake of the Ozarks.
By Bill Poquette, Editor-in-Chief
True to form, S. 2155 arrived right on time, just eight years after the law it was intended to defang, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. True to form, that is to say, because roughly every eight years, major financial reform legislation is spawned to remedy the perceived evils of the previous version. This trend has been quite consistent over almost the past three decades.
