Let’s put the people back in charge of our banking system.

I work with data about mortgage lending that the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council provides through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.  Making this data better would help people in their efforts to seize control over their relationships with their local banks.

HMDA Data Needs to be Fixed

There are a few stories that I can tell with HMDA data.  Sometimes, its a story that seems to make no sense, with one data point contradicting the other.  Sometimes, each additional data point only tells the same story.  In that (more…)

The OCC announced results on 20 CRA evaluations today. Not surprisingly, 19 of the 20 banks got a “satisfactory” and the other received an outstanding.

It has been our feeling for some time that the CRA exams are a charade.  They are supposed to uncover a lack of performance in low or moderate-income census tracts. In any year, more than 2,000 banks are evaluated. In 2008, 2,051 institutions were evaluated.  Twenty-nine were deemed “needs to improve,” and four received a “substantial non-compliance.  That won’t lead to much change, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the regulators are avoiding conflict.  In fact, the market appears to be a stronger enforcement agent – the two largest lenders to get anything below satisfactory were Countrywide and AIG.

This cycle’s outstanding score went to Ephrata National Bank.  (Ticker – ENBP) Here is the pdf of the exam.  Ephrata (more…)

There’s a new boss in town, and it is not the same as the old boss.

Community groups met with Wells Fargo’s senior management from the Carolinas yesterday.  A lot of the people came from what they refer to as “legacy Wachovia.” There were people from Home Mortgage, from REO disposition, from servicing, from deposit services, from diversity programs, and from small business lending.  We were flanked by leaders from some of North Carolina’s leading community development financial institutions.

It was odd, but what emerged was a sense that the leaders of legacy Wachovia had little or no sense of Wells’ track (more…)

When I read the first chapter of Green Metropolis, I was worried that my fears about this book might be confirmed. After all, the blurb says that the author is going to reveal how New York City is more sustainable than Snowmass, Colorado or Burlington, Vermont. Hmm, I thought, there’s not much to that. People in NYC don’t drive cars, they live on top and side-by-side of each other (so they share heating costs), and they have great transit. Why should any readers find it surprising that NYC is so sustainable?

What Would Jane Think?

I remember sitting in a hotel near the campus of Sprint, on about 110th St and Metcalf in Kansas City, Missouri (a national epicenter of sprawl!) and telling my sister (an environmental advocate) that it is not enough to write about how NYC serves as an ideal for sustainability. You can’t turn KC into Greenwich Village, right? In other words, I came to Green Metropolis as a skeptic.

I didn’t want to hear more about how it worked 100 years ago in NYC.  I wanted to hear how policy could make it work in the future.  I wanted to hear about how we could make Johnson County, Kansas or Fulton County, Georgia more sustainable.

Moreover, I thought, why is David Owen singing the praises of NYC, when he moved from there to rural Northwestern Connecticut? Owen must have known that, because (more…)

The GAO has spoken, but will the regulators listen?

The General Accounting Office issued a blistering report that put much of the blame for our financial crisis on the feet of the regulatory agencies. The GAO also made some specific policy suggestions.  Many of those proposals, incidentally, are contained in some form within the Consumer Financial Protection Act (CFPA).

The GAO said that both a lack of adequate data collection and a system that is too broken up were important in (more…)