Growin' Up Gregory

In this month's edition of Independent Banker, ICBA Chairman, Preston Kennedy shared his top three concerns facing community banks. The Federal Reserve's role in real-time payments. Housing finance reform. Credit union poaching of community banks. Below, allow me to interpret this from banker talk into a more understandable and applicable version of how it may affect your financial life. First, from CFO.com - "In a long-awaited move to speed up the U.S. payment system, the Federal Reserve has announced it will develop a real-time service that would eventually link more than 10,000 banks and credit unions across the country." It appears that for the next 4-5 years, small banks won't be playing on a level field with the big boys as there will likely be a tiered system of payment processing from the Fed. This won't affect most people's daily activities as transactions continue to increase in speed.  Just realize that the smaller companies and com...

As many of you know, I work in banking.  Not investment banking, I primarily deal with various loan types to individuals and businesses.  But I do have a pretty solid understanding of interest rates, markets, and long and short term costs and returns.  That being said, my expertise in the area of investing consists of checking my quarterly 401k statement to make sure that it has more money now than it did three months ago.  If you want investment advice, I can give you some names of people I trust and are knowledgeable, just not mine. A month or so ago the cryptocurrency market was going wild.  Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies were all the rage, and there are some people who made tons of money on it...assuming they sold at the right time.  And there are others who will stubbornly ride out this most recent drop off in order to be able to tell all their friends they were "geniuses" for holding on to the crypto investment. But this post isn't abo...