...SNIP...
>The banks were trying to get laws passed that forced credit unions to
>play by the same rules, and obviously the credit unions wanted to
>continue with the status quo. The bankers scream that the S&L debacle
>would be repeated with credit unions due to the regulations they were
>following, while credit unions were saying "market dynamics will protect
>us from such a debacle."
...SNIP...
>I remember one evening my wife and I were out with the president of the
>bank, and he spent the entire evening fussing about these issues and
>how
>he was trying to get his congressmen to take some type action to
>correct the problem before it got out of hand.
I see where Ben (and his wife and the bank president) were coming from,
but there are structural differences between banks and credit unions,
despite their offering similar -- or even identical -- services.
Every person who has an account at the credit union has a vote, and my
vote for the board of directors --despite an account balance usually in
three figures -- counts the same as a person whose accounts exceed the
insured maximums. That is not the case at a bank, where the shareholders
have votes -- based on shares -- and account holders do not. The
difference is important.
I used to work in a rural county where no banks, so far as I know,
complied with the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to
reinvest some part of their earnings in the community of which they are a
part. It was more important to the board of directors to invest where
the return was higher than it was to invest locally and make operating
loans to farmers.
One LO question that comes to me is not so much whether "the rules of the
pond" should be changed, as how changing the rule will affect other
organisms who share the pond as it currently exists, and who gets to
decide on how to balance the costs to the "pond" community.
Dennis Presser
--"Presser, Dennis" <dennis.presser@doa.state.wi.us>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>