An Industry That Can Hold Its Head High

by Henry Meier

I have some good news for a change.  At yesterday’s meeting, NCUA announced that the 2013 Special Assessment (Temporary Corporate Credit Union Stabilization Fund) for credit unions will be 8 basis points, the low end of NCUA’s projections last year.  The assessments will be due by October.  In addition, credit unions continue to make headway in paying off the amount they owe to the Treasury.  This means that after the payments in October, credit unions will owe between $900 million and $3.2 billion to the Treasury, which effectively gave the industry an emergency line of credit after mortgage-backed securities purchased by the Corporates essentially became worthless.

There’s a lot of bad that can be said about the financial crisis, but when all is said and done, credit unions alone can hold their heads high.  Simply put, there is no branch of the lending industry that was less responsible for the financial meltdown, needed less assistance from the American taxpayer or has made more of an effort to repay federal aid.

This is a story we should be proud of and should explain more clearly to the American public.  Everyone knows about TARP and how the federal government gave the banks a line of credit of close to $1 trillion.  Banks have started to brag that they repaid the TARP funds, but without this initial line of credit the captains of industry would be lucky to be selling hot dogs outside Yankee Stadium rather than passing out bonuses.  A little less known is the story of the sainted community banks, which used a program ostensibly designed to provide funding for small businesses to instead pay back their debts to the federal government.

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