Over at the Puget Sound Business Journal, reporter Kirsten Grind posted an interesting story today on their recently-launched BizTalk blog: Crackdown on HomeStreet Bank comes as a surprise
Washington state regulators don’t seem to have much patience these days for our struggling community banks and are increasingly slapping them with cease-and-desist orders to force a turnaround at the institutions.
On Friday, not one, but two of our banks said they were being held on a tighter leash by regulators, including Seattle-based HomeStreet Bank.
For anyone who’s counting, we now have six banks statewide that are working under stricter regulatory rules. That’s a lot, by the way. It wasn’t so long ago that the state had no struggling banks and a cease-and-desist order was something out of the 1980s savings and loan crisis lore.
The post goes on to mention some good news for HomeStreet: increasing mortgage volume and deposits.
If you’d like to discuss the HomeStreet issue in further detail, be sure to check out the forum thread started earlier today by a HomeStreet customer, who writes:
I switched over to Homestreet about a year and a half ago when I decided not to support the large, failing and decidedly insolvent (without tax dollars) bank that I had been using (BOA). A lot of my decision was based on reading their CEOs repudiation of risky loan making and guarantees that Homestreet had not engaged in any of that behavior.
Imagine my disappointment when this nonsense showed up in my mailbox.
Personally, I’ve been doing my primary banking through a local credit union (Prevail) for about the last six years now, and have found the experience to be quite satisfying. Perhaps the stories just aren’t hitting my inbox, but I haven’t heard of any of the local credit unions receiving C&Ds or being in danger of going under…