Excerpt from link below: Small Banks Stay Snug, Like the Fabled Ant, New Jersey "You've got to stick to the basics. "If we've learned anything from current events it's that if you ignore the basics, eventually you're going to get in trouble." Plenty of New Jerseyans have been upended by that trouble, from the investment captains of Summit to the junior analysts of Hoboken to the retirees of Toms River who wince as they peek at their 401(k)'s. But from inside the small banks and credit unions that anchor the state's downtowns...the view is more placid, and shaded by a hint of I-told-you-so.
"I think Main Street banking is going to be back in vogue, and I think a lot of people would use the Jimmy Stewart analogy," said Mr. Fitzgerald, 59, who has worked for New Jersey banks both large and small throughout his career.... "Maybe that's an omen." While national banks gorged on one another in recent years, growing ever larger and devising ever more exotic theories about how and to whom to lend money, smaller, state-chartered institutions watched skeptically from the sidelines, unconvinced that the basic laws of economics had suddenly changed, and husbanding assets that amounted to no more than loose change at their swaggering competitors. A wise strategy, as it turned out. Staying small and staying home has meant staying solvent. State-chartered institutions like Freedom Bank, he said, "are almost without exception in pretty good shape. None of them participated in any of this subprime lending that has caused so much difficulty." And so while Wall Street was sinking on the TV screen, while big companies were wondering whether big banks would lend them any money, while Washington was lurching toward a bailout Paul Fitzgerald, like other small bankers in New Jersey, had other matters to attend to: the daily business of keeping a local economy lubricated. Credit might have frozen in the national economy, but it was still flowing here on Kinderkamack Road. From http://tinyurl.com/5bv49p <http://tinyurl.com/5bv49p> or Jersey - Oradell - Small Banks Keep It Simple, and Avoid Wall Street Meltdown - NYTimes.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/nyregion/new-jersey/19colnj.html?ref=\ new-jersey> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AsburyPark/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AsburyPark/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
