Free Republic

About 60 credit unions in the US are experiencing outages because of a ransomware attack on an IT provider the credit unions use, a federal agency said Friday. The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the agency that insures deposits at federally insured credit unions, said in a statement to CNN that it was “coordinating with affected credit unions” in the wake of the hack. The full extent of the outage and its impact on credit unions was unclear Friday evening. One of the affected credit unions, New York-based Mountain Valley Federal Credit Union, said that technicians from the hacked IT...

650 U.S. banks will soon be able to offer bitcoin purchases to an estimated 24 million total customers. As part of the deal between enterprise payments giant NCR and digital-asset management firm NYDIG, community banks, including North Carolina-based First Citizens Bank, and credit unions, including Bay Federal Credit Union in California, will be able to offer their clients cryptocurrency trading through mobile applications built by the payments provider. Instead of having to deal with the burdensome regulatory requirements related to actually holding the cryptocurrency for their customers, the financial institutions that opt to make the service available will rely on...

Economists anticipate 2021 will be a banner year for business spending, and it seems the credit union industry wants to hit the ground running. In a recent announcement, the Florida-based Vystar Credit Union agreed to buy the Georgia-based Heritage Southeast Bank, becoming the second credit union-bank acquisition of 2021, the first involving a bank over $1 billion in assets, and the largest such purchase in history. This news is the latest in the concerning trend of many large, multibillion dollar tax-exempt credit unions picking off community banks, and confirms that this practice is likely to continue through the year. Congress...

Federal regulators need to explain why they’ve granted a perpetually-floundering California credit union that serves organized labor permission to raise money from investors—especially considering those regulators haven’t given the same green light to a strong and growing credit union that serves rural Idahoans. Credit unions are member-owned nonprofits and generally can use only retained earnings for expansion plans. If a credit union wants to grow using secondary capital from investors, it must first seek permission from the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), which is supposed to evaluate the credit union’s stability and financial position before giving the green light. A...

Recently, I was elected treasurer of my local SAR chapter, the older male equivalent of the far better known Daughters of the American Revolution.Thus, I was appalled to learn what a partly rate of interest our existing bank paid on a recently matured CD (0.06%!) and refused to renew it, asking them to deposit it into our checking account instead.Accordingly, I am now actually shopping for another bank our credit union willing to offer a fine, patriotic organization such as our better rates and service. My retirement money, for example, is with Charles Schwab, where I can earn 2.3% (annualized)...

A Senate panel on Tuesday approved legislation that would provide banks and credit unions with relief from some of the stricter regulatory requirements put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. The bill, which was approved by a 16-7 vote, raises the threshold at which bank holding companies are considered too big to fail, thus subjecting them to financial stress tests and a capital-planning review. The threshold would increase from $50 billion to $250 billion. The panel rejected an array of amendments that senators said could unravel a bipartisan agreement crafted over several months. The bill is much narrower than...

SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan – The financially troubled USA Federal Credit Union will merge with Navy Federal Credit Union -- a larger competitor that also serves U.S. military bases in the Pacific -- both credit unions said Tuesday. San Diego-based USA Federal, which operates 11 branches in Japan and South Korea and eight in southern California, said recently that it was considering mergers after being rocked by bad mortgages and the global economic recession. Its branches will become part of the Navy Federal network Oct. 1, pending approval by the National Credit Union Administration, according to a joint news release....

When Credit Unions Fail by: Felix Salmon September 27, 2010 There are lots of great credit unions in America, all of which are owned by their members. And then there are the corporate credit unions, which are atrocious and expensive failures. Today, the final nail was placed in their coffin when the last three big corporates were officially taken over by the government.Trying to explain what’s going on here isn’t easy, but essentially corporate credit unions are credit unions’ credit unions. While you or I might belong to a friendly local credit union with human members, that credit union, in...

Two years after the peak of the financial crisis, the federal government swooped in to stabilize a crucial part of the credit-union sector battered by losses on subprime mortgages. Regulators announced Friday a rescue of the nation's wholesale credit unions, underpinned by a federal guarantee valued at $30 billion or more. Wholesale unions don't deal with the general public but provide essential back-office services to thousands of other credit unions across the U.S. The majority of retail credit unions are sound, but they are exposed to the losses through the industry's insurance fund. Friday's moves include the seizure of three...

Written Notice for Existing Accounts The Credit Union will make a change in the way it reports your Account balance as part of an aggregate total to the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB). This change will not affect your available balance, dividend earnings on dividend bearing accounts, NCUA insurance, statement or any other feature of your Account. This will allow us to substantially lower our reserve requirement balance at the FRB and increase the amount of funds available for loans and investments, thereby increasing our ability to serve our members. Credit Union Checking, Savings and Money Market Accounts will now be...

Regulators take over 2 wholesale credit unions based in Kansas, California Federal regulators on Friday seized control of two large institutions that provide wholesale financing for U.S. credit unions, a move they say was needed to stabilize the credit union system. The National Credit Union Administration said it has taken over and put into conservatorship the two corporate credit unions, U.S. Central Federal Credit Union, based in Lenexa, Kan., and Western Corporate Federal Credit Union, in San Dimas, Calif. A conservatorship enables the government to operate a financial institution. Corporate credit unions provide financing and investment services to retail credit...

In the latest dramatic move by federal authorities to prop up the nation's banking system, regulators late Friday seized control of the two largest wholesale credit unions in the U.S. after finding that their losses on mortgage-related securities were even larger than previously thought.

Corporate Credit Unions taken over by regulator - YIKES. I cannot get through to the URL right now, just announced on TV

For those who want us to believe the world is in a credit crunch, where no one is lending, and no one can qualify for a mortgage------ For the first two months of this year, an un-named credit union is closing approximately 213 first mortgages (not home equity loans or home equity lines of credit) to the tune of $49.35 million dollars. Now, truth be told, only 18 of those 213 loans, or less than nine percent were purchase money loans; the rest were refinances. But, if you have good credit and you have equity, you can still get credit....

Federal credit unions, including those serving millions of military patrons, are fighting to keep off their books nearly $5 billion in charges that regulators have assessed to bail out their largest “corporate” credit union. The U.S. Central Federal Credit Union was in danger of insolvency due to losses on mortgage-backed securities until regulators adopted a bailout plan Jan. 28 that would be financed by 7900 member-based credit unions. “If we were to allow something to happen to U.S. Central, the impact on the industry would have been devastating,” said Michael E. Fryzel, board chairman of the National Credit Union Administration...

BY MARK MAREMONT In the latest effort to prop up a sector of the finance industry, federal regulators on Wednesday guaranteed $80 billion in uninsured deposits at the powerful institutions that service the nation's credit unions -- a maneuver that shows how the economic crisis continues to ripple across the U.S. Regulators also injected $1 billion of new capital into the largest of these wholesale credit unions, U.S. Central Federal Credit Union of Lenexa, Kan., after the firm on Wednesday posted an unexpected $1.1 billion loss for 2008. U.S. Central serves essentially as a main clearinghouse for the others in...

Hackers on Tuesday hijacked the Web site CheckFree.com, one of the largest online bill payment companies, redirecting an unknown number of visitors to a Web address that tried to install malicious software on visitors' computers, the company said today. The attack, first reported by The Register, a security news Web site, began in the early morning hours of Dec. 2, when Checkfree's home page and the customer login page were redirected to a server in the Ukraine. CheckFree spokeswoman Melanie Tolley said users who visited the sites during the attack would have been redirected to a blank page that tried...

My recent article on the advantages of credit unions versus traditional banks and savings institutions generated a lot of reader interest. One of the interested readers was Benson Porter, a former Washington Mutual executive, now chief executive of Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union. In a recent interview, Porter reinforced some of the differences between credit unions and their banking counterparts, many of which were captured in my previous article. See related column. Then he shared several important ways credit unions are breaking old molds and evolving faster than some may realize: Practically anyone can join. In the old days, most...

Recently a friend told the story of his 80-year-old father submitting a check for payment at Washington Mutual. "The bank bounced the check," he said. Think about it: Your check didn't clear, not because of you but because the bank had insufficient funds. Not a story you hear often and sad indeed. Washington Mutual, IndyMac, Wachovia. Sweaty palms everywhere as people wonder what's next. If you haven't already, it might be time to check out your corner credit union. Those on the highest ground fare better in a hurricane. So where's the "high ground" in financial services today? Right now,...

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Senator Barack Obama, vying for the Democratic presidential candidacy, vowed to change bankruptcy laws and cap interest rates during his campaign tour in Southern California, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. During what his campaign dubbed a "Roundtable on Economic Opportunity" there, Obama called for an exemption in the 2005 bankruptcy bill for people who can persuade a bankruptcy court that they filed for bankruptcy because of debts caused by medical expenses. His proposal also includes extending the 36-percent limit on payday loans to military members to all Americans; encouraging banks, credit unions and...