My 12 gifts to the credit union industry

It’s been a wild year, and there is undoubtedly more to come. Just imagine: If Amazon has its way, the Christmas Eve sky will be filled with drones handing off presents to husbands everywhere who never found the time to shop for the Misses. Have fun explaining that one to the tyke looking for Santa’s sleigh! So, here are my gifts to an industry that needs a breather (and could use some help).

12. To the NCUA, I give the willingness to broadcast their meetings live over the Internet. The archived recordings just don’t go far enough, and my DVR is already filled with shows I don’t watch. For those of us who monitor regulations for a living, seeing the actual meeting and hearing the discussions (particularly those regarding important proposals) is overdue.

11. To Keith Liggett of the ABA’s Credit Union Watch Blog, I give anonymous membership to any credit union of his choice. No one who knows the industry as well as Keith does should have to miss out on the superior service and great savings offered by credit unions just because he works for the banking industry.

10. To the CFPB, I give the authority to rename “Qualified Mortgages” anything but “Qualified Mortgages.” The ultimate goal of the Dodd-Frank-mandated regulations is to make mortgage lending safer by making sure that lenders can document why someone can repay a loan—not to mandate that only certain types of loans be made. But who the heck wouldn’t want to make anything but Qualified Mortgages if given the choice?

9. On a closely related note, to NCUA examiners, I give a friendly reminder not to assume that a credit union should be subject to greater loan loss scrutiny simply because it is making non-QM mortgages.

8. To the credit union industry as a whole, I give a legislative agenda that not only aims to protect the credit union tax exemption, but also pushes for vital reforms such as secondary capital, MBL reform and (my personal favorite) merchant liability for data breaches.

7. To former Yankees Second Baseman Robinson Cano, who said he felt disrespected by the Yankees when they offered him a paltry $170 million to stay with the team before he grabbed $240 million with the Mariners, I give a reality check and a really trustworthy financial adviser. After all, anyone that out of touch with reality just might be foolish enough to lose all that money.

6. In full recognition of the fact that this is a shameless self-promotional plug, I give you all the link to the New York’s State of Mind blog, where you can get my daily updates and analysis on issues impacting the credit union industry: http://newyorksstateofmind.wordpress.com/.

5. To those credit unions that were eligible for the classification and became classified as low-income credit unions under the NCUA’s streamlined review process introduced this year, I give you my sincere congratulations on the smartest move you made all year. You don’t have an MBL cap, and you can accept secondary capital. To those eligible credit unions that have not accepted the designation, I give a lump of coal! What are you waiting for?

4. To the National Labor Relations Board, I give an invitation to work in any office in America that isn’t populated by NLRB lawyers so it  can get a sense of how the NLRB is interfering with the day-to-day management of the workplace. The NLRB is quietly seeking to expand powers to the detriment of anyone who has to manage people for a living and wants to rely on commonsense.

3. To compliance people everywhere, I give the right to use all your vacation time in 2014. This should be a relatively mild year…at least compared to the last five.

2. To banking lawyers, I give the advice that they brush up on the Administrative Procedures Act. Virtually every major legal challenge involving banking, ranging from the Volker Rule to the Durbin Amendment, involves consideration of how regulators go about promulgating regulations and how much flexibility  they have when  interpreting federal legislation.

1. And to everyone committed to making sure that consumers get a fair deal, that the poor have access to financial institutions dedicated to helping them climb the economic ladder, and that laws and regulations don’t stifle innovation in the name of protecting the consumer, I give my sincerest wishes for Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!