Want to know what Meredith Whitney really thinks?
Today in the
Wall Street Journal
, the notoriously bearish bank analyst takes a whack at the government’s proposed regulatory reforms. Well-intended reform will likely do more harm than good, she suggests, by driving consumer credit out of the market and putting many community banks out of business.
Whitney has been spreading her wings lately, flying around the U.S. To advise Federal Reserve and other government officials who have the power to move markets and policy. In her pro bono counsel role, she can be as critical as she’s been in the gig that made her famous, rating financial stocks. (She has “Buy” ratings on Visa and MasterCard, but except for these two, her sole outperform ratings in the past couple of years have been Goldman Sachs for a scant three months last year, and American Express until she downgraded that stock in July 2008.) Regarding today’s WSJ op-ed, she told me in an email last night: “I fear that practices to halt ‘predatory lending’ will in fact only promote it.”
Whitney’s worry: as traditional banks have cut lending to small businesses, non-traditional players like pay-day lenders and check-cashing outfits are gaining ground. These alternative lenders “are actually more expensive, less regulated, and more ‘predatory’ than the system we know now,” she wrote in her email. “I worry that the unintended consequences of some of the amendments to Reg Reform will just make it a lot more expensive to be poor in the U.S.”
Fair point. And speaking of small-business lenders, are you watching the drama around Chicago’s ShoreBank? This is a community bank in Chicago that the FDIC has been calling on Goldman, Citigroup, and other giants to help save. ShoreBank has just $2.4 billion in assets, and you have to wonder why the big effort to shore Shore when the government has let many bigger banks go under? Some suggest that Shore’s historical ties to the Obama Administration make it a tiny bank with big clout.