A recent report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) grabbed our attention with this headline. Then we realized, it was comparing mortgage performance to a year ago (Q1’20 i.e. pre-pandemic). While we did see a spike…
Category: Pandemic
Credit Loss Expectations Brighten
Coral Gables, Florida, June 16, 2021 Coral Gables, FL: BAUERFINANCIAL, Inc., the nation’s premier Bank and Credit Union rating firm, is pleased to report that the majority of U.S. banks have been able to reverse loan loss provisions as the…
Economic Injustice Puts Banks on Notice
As we write this week’s article, CEOs of six of the nation’s largest banks are taking a verbal beating from Congress. Lawmakers took exception to some of the ways they perceive these bankers have taken advantage of poorer clients during…
Lending a Helping Hand, Sometimes Means Lending.
Loan volumes at the nation’s community banks grew over 10% during 2020. And that’s no coincidence. With help from the Government’s Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) Program, Commercial & Industrial (C&I) Loans accounted for more than two-thirds of that growth. But…
Temporary Hit to Capital Ratios
…and They’d do it Again. This week we will take a look at how some community banks have been helping their neighbors and communities during the past year. In some cases, that help has come at the expense of the…
Big Bank Branches are Fewer by the Month
It seems that every week there’s a new story about a bank that’s closing branches. We’ve almost become numb to it… unless of course it’s our branch that’s shutting down. But its who is closing those branches is what we…
Financial Inclusion: We Can All Play a Part
The FDIC launched the pilot of a new public awareness campaign last week (April 6th) on the benefits of having a bank account. The pilot targets the Houston and Atlanta areas, where it confirmed that both Black Americans and Hispanic…
Two Days, Two Divergent Opinions, Who’s Right?
On Monday, March 15th, The Wall Street Journal ran a very upbeat article entitled, “U.S. Banks Will Turn Last Year’s Fear Into This Year’s Profits”. The article opines that the tens of billions of dollars that were set aside by…
New Bank Data Shows Income Down Not Out
All bank star-ratings and reports are now based on year-end 2020 financial data. (Credit Unions will be updated soon.) Three new banks opened their doors during the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of de novos for 2020 up to…
Loans to Bank Insiders Top $34 Billion
Loans to bank insiders often arouse negative feelings to bank outsiders. Those people often hear news of inordinate salaries or bonuses paid to bank CEOs. So we were not surprised when there was pushback to the idea of forgiving certain…