Banking Industry

WASHINGTON -- The severe slump in commercial real estate is making the outlook increasingly grim for the banking industry, with several big institutions likely to fail next year, driving the federal insurance fund for deposits into a deep deficit, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman L. William Seidman has warned Congress.As the tide of bank failures mounts in 1992, the insurance fund, which protects deposits up to $100,000, will be badly weakened, facing a deficit of $11 billion by the year's end, Seidman said yesterday.

I am a registered Republican, and I fully support the regulation of Wall Street. After the bankruptcy of such companies as Enron, WorldCom, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, etc., the financial market went on with business as usual. No one seemed to question the ethics of the heads of these companies and whether or not they were running the companies effectively. It continued, and soon the banking industry followed suit. Can we with stand another round of unchecked financial responsibilities?

For a while, Alan Penniman Hoblitzell Jr. saw the future earlier and clearer than most.As tumultuous changes loomed in the banking industry during the 1980s, he foresaw only two roles for mid-sized banks like his Maryland National. Swallow or be swallowed.Mr. Hoblitzell never wavered.He had spent his entire career at the bank, rising from trainee to chairman. To the outside world, he had become indistinguishable from Maryland National. He had nurtured it as it became Maryland's dominant bank and one of the region's most visible civic leaders.

Some things have changed in the banking industry and some haven't. In the fall of 2008 Wall Street was on the brink of financial disaster, and only extraordinary federal intervention, including a $700 billion bank bailout fund, spared the industry from ruin. Fast-forward to the present, where many financial giants are set to post big profits thanks to a market rebound - and the largesse of U.S. taxpayers. But old habits die hard: Wall Street is set to award some of the biggest bonuses in history.

NCNB Corp., one of the country's largest banking companies, reported sharply lower fourth-quarter earnings yesterday as weakening real estate markets and a deteriorating economy continued their rampage through the banking industry.For the three months that ended Dec. 31, the Charlotte, N.C.-based company said it earned $31.2 million, or 26 cents a share fully diluted, down from $136.2 million, or $1.25 a share, a year earlier.NCNB, with $65.3 billion in assets, operates 923 branches in seven states.

WASHINGTON -- Progress on sweeping bank legislation has become increasingly subject to political maneuvering in both houses of Congress, with floor action expected no sooner than September, congressional aides and banking industry sources say.House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell remains in no rush to act on the banking reforms, and the Senate Banking Committee continues to refine the details of a bill that likely will be introduced next...

POLITICAL stability was achieved but the economic crisis ignored when Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) chose Foreign Minister Keizo Obuchi as its chief. He will be elected prime minister by the lower house of parliament tomorrow.Mr. Obuchi, who has been foreign minister for a year but has no major economic experience, won because he is the boss of the biggest faction of the party.That's how things have always been done by the LDP, which has learned nothing during the current crisis.

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department sided with the nation's banking industry yesterday against the Clinton administration's banking regulators, blocking plans to step up enforcement of laws aimed at increasing lending in poor neighborhoods.The official statement of the administration's legal policy does not affect separate laws against racial discrimination that the Justice Department has vigorously enforced this year. But the legal opinion represents another blow to President Clinton's 1992 campaign pledge to make it easier for poor people to borrow money and revive their neighborhoods.

A massive national survey by the Federal Reserve shows that minorities are two to four times as likely to be rejected for bank mortgages as whites with comparable income, according to those who have seen the new report.The nationwide data, due out later this month, could provide powerful ammunition to politicians and community leaders who have long argued that lending discrimination is a fact of life at the nation's banks. It also could hurt the banking industry and slow some proposed bank mergers at a time when the industry can least afford it, analysts say."

William W. Simpson Jr., a retired banking executive and accountant, died Sunday of kidney failure at Stella Maris Hospice. The Timonium resident was 80. Born and raised in Baltimore, he was a 1940 graduate of Polytechnic Institute. He earned a business degree from the University of Baltimore and a master's in business administration from Loyola College, and became a certified public accountant in 1952. In 1946, he started work as a teller at the old Baltimore Federal Savings and Loan Association, and in his 34 years with the institution rose through the ranks to become senior executive vice president and chief administrative officer.

The financial crisis of 2007-2009, has tilted the playing field against community banks and has raised a general danger for all banks that they will face steeper regulatory burdens than other kinds of financial firms. This is not only bad for the banking industry but for the American economy. Regulatory anomalies create economic inefficiencies that translate into less safe and sound financial institutions and less sound credit being made available to the marketplace. Once the financial crisis was at a full boil, the Treasury, Federal Reserve and financial regulatory agencies rightly, through a variety of mechanisms, kept many larger institutions from failing.

As he has done on Saturday for several years, Steve Ricker went to Suburban Federal Savings Bank in Crofton yesterday to get change for his convenience store a few blocks away. "This bank has always met my needs," Ricker said. "They gave me my first mortgage 30 years ago." Though by all appearances it was business as usual, yesterday was no ordinary day. After seizing Suburban Federal the night before, federal officials were on the scene yesterday with the bank's staff, paving the way for Suburban's sale to a Virginia-based bank.

As the Bush administration moved to rescue the nation's largest two mortgage companies, confidence in the banking sector spiraled downward yesterday. In Southern California, lines snaked around branches of IndyMac Bancorp, the large lender seized by federal regulators Friday, while customers hurried to withdraw their money. As the anxiety spread through the financial markets, two other big banks, one in Ohio and another in Washington state, felt compelled to assert that they were sound.

A ruling yesterday from the state's highest court over prepayment mortgage charges could make it more expensive for some to obtain home equity loans, the banking industry's trade association warned. The Maryland Court of Appeals found that state-chartered Provident Bank assessed a "prepayment charge" that's not allowed under state law. The bank had waived $680 in closing costs on a $17,000 loan to Andrew Bednar in 2003 but collected the money after the loan was paid off early when he refinanced with another lender two years later.

I can proudly state that I now know a considerable amount about the savings and loan industry in Baltimore. "Please," I can hear you readers fervently praying, "let us in on some of the complex issues facing the finance industry today. And then wake us up!" For the past six months or so, I have been writing the 100-year history of a truly unique savings and loan association in Baltimore, Eladesor Laredef; its name has naturally been spelled backwards for privacy protection. But I am not going to tell you much about this venerable institution, because that would spoil the book.

Consumers have a plethora of borrowing and saving options, from traditional banks to online-only banks to credit unions and investment brokerages. And while Internet-only banks can offer the most competitive rates for saving and borrowing, credit unions offer a mix of favorable rates and personal service. They're often a good alternative to traditional banks, which still dominate the market. Credit unions are affiliated groups of people who pool their money and lend it to each other. They don't have divided loyalties; they're not trying to serve a customer at the same time as boosting profits and the stock price for shareholders.

WASHINGTON -- The nation's senior auditor said yesterday that the banking industry might be headed for a large taxpayer bailout.Some members of Congress and analysts of the nation's commercial and savings bank industry have made such warnings before.But the prediction by the comptroller general, Charles A. Bowsher, is significant because he is widely considered the most credible impartial voice in government.His early assessments of the problems of savings and loan institutions and later of the huge costs in that bailout have proved prophetic.

WASHINGTON -- Federal regulators discounted the prospect of a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout for the banking industry yesterday, but admitted that many banks still faced major problems, including shaky real estate loans and risky interest rate spreads."

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is considering requiring banks, for the first time, to inform the government of all their customers' international wire transfers, regardless of possible terrorist ties, a Treasury Department official said yesterday. Such mandatory reporting would mark a major expansion of the government's efforts to comb financial data to fight terrorism and other international crimes. Depending on how the program is structured, it could mean that banks would be forced to turn over data on millions of transactions that they are now required to keep secret.

In the not-too-distant future, small cargo planes such as the one that crashed in Ferndale last week, killing its pilot, might no longer embark on such journeys. Or at least, the planes might not carry checks. Backed by federal legislation called the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, banks are making plans to send checks by electronic imaging rather than by ground or air transport. Industry experts predict banks eventually will save more than $2 billion a year through the transition.