Say goodbye to your neighborhood bank branch

Say goodbye to your neighborhood bank branch

That bank branch on the corner — and the one on the way to work — may not be there much longer. As technology transforms banking, like it has so many other sectors, the consequence could be a dramatic decline in the industry's outposts over the next decade, experts say.  "I have no doubt that the financial industry will face a series of Uber moments," he said in the late-November speech in London, referring to the way that Uber and other ride-hailing companies have rapidly unsettled the taxi industry. And that's not just the opinion of one well-informed man. In a recent report, analysts with Citi said they agreed with Jenkins's view that the number of bank branches could be cut in half over the next decade. A separate survey from Accenture, the management consulting company, shows why: Shifting consumer behavior. "We believe the consumer banks in the US and Europe are at a tipping point," wrote the authors of the Citi report, which was published late last month. The number of bank branches in the United States — represented by the dashed blue line in the chart below — could shrink by a third within the decade, according to their forecasts. Customer preferences are key to that industry transformation. What they want and expect from banks has changed dramatically in just a few years.  In just two years, the local branch went from being a concern of half of banking customers to just a fifth. Separate data, from industry analysts Mercator Advisory Group and cited by Citi, paints the same picture: The share of customers who reported going to a branch to speak to a teller at least once in the previous year fell from 79 percent to 70 percent from 2011 to 2014. The share that reported visiting a branch to speak with a customer service representative fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. As branches matter less, online banking matters more. For the first time in Accenture's research, good online services ranked as the top reason to stick with a bank. Some 38 percent of consumers surveyed last year cited that as a reason to stay with their bank, while just 28 percent cited branch location. Twenty-eight percent also cited low fees. That holds true for populations that have long been used to visiting branches, too: Among customers over the age of 55, the preference for online banking leads the desire for convenient branch locations by a similar 10-percentage-point margin. "This evolution in consumer preference signals a redefinition of banking convenience," the report's authors wrote. "It is no longer always measured in miles to the branch or extra service hours — it is increasingly measured in clicks and apps." A deeper dive into the Accenture data, represented in the Citi chart below, shows how little branches factor into most bank interactions. Overall, customers engage with their banks an average of 17 times a month. Yet only two of those interactions involve human contact. In the United States, only two out of 15 monthly bank interactions involves a branch. "Banks will follow consumer behavior and close branches as they see their consumers shift away from branches to digital," the authors of the Citi report write. While Citi expects an industrywide decline, it expects the transformation to play out differently both globally and within countries. Generally, developed markets can expect branch numbers to dwindle, while emerging markets can expect the opposite, the authors write. That applies to the United States, too, even though it seems to lag its European and Nordic peers by about five and 10 years, respectively. While the number of branches per capita remained unchanged in the United States from 2004 to 2014, it dropped 30 percent in Nordic countries, 22 percent in East Asia and the Pacific and 17 percent in the Euro zone, according to World Bank and Citi data. The number of branches per capita rose 26 percent in Latin American and the Caribbean. Despite the "massive pressure" that Barclays's Jenkins predicts, there will be regional variation in the trend toward closing branches even within countries. Wealthy cities, such as New York, and fast-growing suburbs may see an increase, even as branches are shuttered elsewhere in the country.

Gone from the cutting-edge bank: Tellers

When Wells Fargo opened its first high-tech branch three years ago in the District’s NoMa neighborhood, it did away with desks and replaced traditional counters with large touch-screen ATMs. Also gone from its new location: tellers. Instead, the 1,000-square-foot branch has a handful of tablet-toting employees to help customers navigate technology to deposit checks, apply for loans or open savings accounts. It’s a model that’s being replicated throughout the region, leading to a shift in the number — and types — of employees at area banks. The number of banks tellers in the region has dropped by nearly half in the past 10 years, from 10,980 in 2005 to 5,990 in 2015, outpacing a 17 percent drop nationally, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall employment in the Washington region rose 7.3 percent in the same period. Median annual pay for tellers, meanwhile, has risen 35 percent, to $32,250 as tellers are increasingly required to be well-versed in technology. A recent report by Citigroup estimates that an additional 30 percent of U.S. banking jobs could be eliminated by 2025 as financial firms shutter branches and invest more heavily in technology. “There has been a tremendous change in the mix of bank employees, with a much greater reliance on tech workers,” said Bert Ely, a banking industry consultant in Alexandria. “Banks are cutting a lot of so-called back-office processing jobs — and that is something that will continue.” Experts say the trend is likely to be magnified in the Washington area, where an influx of young professionals and tech-savvy customers has ushered in a number of high-tech branches that require few employees. Recent bank mergers and branch closings also have contributed to shrinkage in the pool of jobs. “Traffic in branches is down dramatically,” said Ronald D. Paul, chief executive of Bethesda-based Eagle Bancorp, the region’s largest community bank. “You just don’t need that many branches anymore.” As a result, the company has closed less-frequented branches and moving others into smaller spaces. It also is adding more high-tech workers, including computer programmers and commercial deposit officers who can help troubleshoot technology, to its ranks. The number of bank branches in the Washington region has been steadily dropping in recent years. Last year, the area had 1,697 branches, 84 fewer than it did in 2010, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “It was the ATM that started this spiral 25 or 30 years ago,” said Stephen Fuller, an economist and senior adviser at George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. “We’ve just about replaced the need to have people in those spaces.” Indeed, nearly four in 10 Americans have not visited a bank or credit union branch in at least six months, according to a survey by Bankrate.com, a New York-based personal-finance information company. When customers do stop by the bank, it is generally for financial consultations or to open accounts, not routine transactions, the survey found. “The bank as it is today is becoming more interactional and less transactional,” said David M. Glaser, a vice president at District-based National Capital Bank. “When people come in, it’s with a more complex question or to open an account. If they just need to deposit a check — well, they can do that at the ATM.” At PNC, which has done away with tellers at a number of area branches, new hires are as likely to come from a tech company as from another bank, said Todd Barnhart, head of branch distribution. “The way we think about recruiting has changed pretty significantly,” he said. “Five or 10 years ago, we might have looked at employees at the bank down the street. “Today we’re looking at people from the Apple store, AT&T store and other tech-centric retailers.” The company’s “innovation branch” in Tenleytown, for example, has six employees, all of whom are trained to help customers with everything from deposits to loan applications. “We’re not building branches with teller lines but with places where customers and employees can have meaningful conversations,” he said. Instead of having separate tellers and mortgage officers, “it’s one job, one person,” Barnhart said, adding that roughly half of the bank’s deposits now come through its mobile app or ATMs. “What people are looking for in a bank is much different than it used to be,” he said. “Employees need to be prepared to answer things like, ‘How do I do this on my mobile phone?’ or ‘How do I do this online?’ ” Among Americans with smartphones, 52 percent used mobile banking in 2014, according to a Federal Reserve survey. The vast majority of users — 94 percent — use mobile apps to check their account balances, while 61 percent use them to transfer money between their accounts and 51 percent to deposit checks. The median frequency of use was five times a month. Meanwhile, national bank employment has been falling an average of 2 percent a year since the recession, according to the Citigroup report. “The future of branches in banking is about focusing on advisory and consultation rather than transactions,” according to the Citigroup report. “Branches and associated staff costs make up about 65 percent of the total retail cost base of a larger bank and a lot of these costs can be removed via automation.” Banks in Scandinavia, Finland and the Netherlands have cut branches by roughly 50 percent from recent peak levels, according to the Citigroup report. If U.S. banks were to take similar measures, they could save as much as $175 billion in costs and add 39 percent to their pretax profit, the report said. “This is all part of a technological evolution that is taking place in banking,” Ely said. “In this low-interest-rate environment, banks are under great pressure to cut costs, and one of the easiest ways to do that, among other things, is through branch closures and consolidations.”

I saved the economy and all I got was this glass eagle

How do you say good-bye to the man credited with saving America from the next Great Depression? Today is the last day of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's tumultuous eight-year tenure as the shepherd of the U.S. economy. And if tradition is any guide, he is likely to be seen off with this gift from his Fed colleagues: a glass replica of the eagle that graces the entrance to the central bank's headquarters at the historic Marriner S. Eccles building. The eagle – a gift paid for through contributions from central bank staff – is typically given to departing governors at an informal farewell ceremony in the building's marbled atrium. They also usually receive a U.S. flag that has flown on the top of the building, along with a framed collection of dollar bills from each of the 12 regional Fed districts. Afterward, a few cookies might be laid out. There is also usually a lunch or dinner during the official's last meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank's policy-setting arm. The meal is usually held at the Fed, sometimes in the room used for press conferences. (That should bring back some fond memories.) The remarks at the meal tend to be typical farewell fodder – a little bit sad, a little bit funny, a little bit flowery. It would be an appropriately low-key exit for a chairman who has made connecting with Main Street and increasing transparency two of his top priorities at the Fed. Bernanke has said he plans to stay in Washington, at least for now. However, a noted Nationals fan, Bernanke has pointed out that baseball commissioner Bud Selig plans to retire in a year. Home run.

Millennials aren’t abandoning brick-and-mortar banks

When's the last time you visited your local bank? A Bankrate.com survey released today found that one in five Americans hadn't visited their bank at all in the past year. But perhaps more surprising, fully 50 percent of Americans had been to their local branch at least once in the past 30 days.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Back in 2012, the American Banking Association found that 39 percent of Americans chose online banking as their preferred means of managing their accounts, more than twice the share who favored visiting their local branch (18 percent). Statistics like this one, coupled with the rise of online banking and virtual tellers, have led many to start ringing the death knell for the traditional neighborhood bank branch. What's the point of taking your paycheck to a teller when you can simply snap a photo of it on your phone?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University But today's Bankrate survey suggests these claims of death have been greatly exaggerated. It also sheds some light on who is and isn't going to the bank. Perhaps predictably, Millennials are the age group least likely to have visited a bank branch in the past week, at 19 percent. But Millennials aren't abandoning banks completely, they're simply going less often - 23 percent visited a bank in the last month, and another third went some time in the last year. Banks' efforts to reach younger customers have come in for some ridicule lately. JP Morgan had to abandon an attempted Twitter chat last year after trolls hijacked the hashtag to lob withering criticism at the company. A recent report by the Carlisle and Gallagher consulting group found that a whopping 87 percent of Americans found banks' use of social media "annoying, boring or unhelpful."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University All this suggests that banks might best focus less on the social media shenanigans, and more on providing the core services their customers need. Americans aren't ready to give up on brick-and-mortar banking just yet. _The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from March 6-9, 2014, among 1,003 U.S. adults._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

The internet didn’t kill bank branches. Bank mergers did.

Bank branches have long been a trusty space-filler for commercial landlords. They'll pay whatever rent you charge, pretty much. Though nobody's particularly excited about a new bank branch in their neighborhood, residents usually won't resist them, either. And weirdly, despite the seeming ubiquity of ATMs and online banking, bank branches haven't gone the way of the travel agency or even the real estate office. They're still all over major cities, taking up prime corners, to the point where New York City's Upper West Side passed a zoning overlay to limit their growth (although of course, there are still plenty of poor neighborhoods that don't even have a single one).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University In 2007, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation found that having a convenient bank branch was still the most important factor consumers looked at when deciding where to put their money, and having more branches tended to correlate with higher profits. As federal and state laws regulating the number of branches a bank could have were liberalized, the number of branches grew by 27 percent from 1994 to 2006. At the same time, though, the branches were getting leaner--the average bank outpost had 20 employees in 1988, but only 14 in 2004.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Branch networks finally started to shrink in 2010, when banks shed 1,100 locations, according to research firm Bancography. The decline has continued over the past couple of years, led by the troubled Bank of America, which shuttered 193 branches in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of transactions per branch declined too, from 10,200 per month in 2007 to 7,600 per month in 2012.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University It's not because people aren't depositing cash. Consumers who are less willing to spend money in a shaky economy are more likely to sock it away in a bank account (especially in Washington D.C., which leads the nation's large cities in deposit growth). And it's not entirely because people are banking online. Rather, it's because a number of large banks in the same markets have merged--like Wachovia and Wells Fargo, or BB&T and Colonial--and decided to save on real estate costs by closing down branches. The _Wall Street Journal_ recently parsed the branch closing phenomenon, focusing on the small towns that lose an important institution when a bank closes its doors. And the _Atlanta Journal-Constitution_ points out that even if people do their day-to-day money management online, they still like a branch nearby to open an account and conduct significant transactions, like taking out a loan. So bank branches will likely never disappear completely-- they're just a less reliable option for landlords looking to rent a storefront.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Banking on local ties at our neighborhood PNC branch

We read with delight Jim Dinegar’s May 11 Local Opinions commentary, “No need to fear a company that’s ‘not from here,’ ” which discussed how PNC Bank management has emphasized a good-neighbor policy since arriving in the D.C. region. Two years after buying Riggs Bank, PNC bought the bank where we did our banking, the old Annapolis Banking and Trust. Though we could now do it all online, we routinely go to the Odenton branch just to chat with our friends there. We are greeted by name and always welcomed. PNC gives us the efficiency and range of services of a national institution and the friendliness of a truly good small-town neighbor. How seldom one sees that anymore. ****John and Sally Alexander** , Crownsville**

Closing its bookstore shows how out of touch the World Bank has become

I was appalled to read in John Kelly’s Aug. 3 Metro column, “A cool downtown bookstore you might not know about will be closing soon,” of the World Bank’s plan to close its bookstore on Pennsylvania Avenue. I also was disappointed by the facile explanation from bank spokesman David Theis: “We aren’t about selling books in Washington — we want to spread knowledge in Burkina Faso.” Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Has the bank’s senior management become so inward-looking that it doesn’t realize how hopelessly misunderstood the bank is by the world at large? The bookshop has provided a rare opportunity for the public, whether academics or tourists, to obtain a sense of the rich mosaic of areas in which the bank is active throughout the developing world. With the bookstore’s demise, people will just see the giant concrete and glass edifice next door to the bookstore, which gives no hint of the scholarship or commitment to development of many of the bank’s employees. When I was chief spokesman at the World Bank in the 1990s, we explored the idea of an interactive visitor center that would bring the bank’s work to life, but the plan was axed for budgetary reasons, with the argument that the bookstore would serve visitors’ needs. The bank’s board, which represents all its member countries, should force the management to reverse this decision. ****Tim Cullen** , Derbyhaven,   Isle of Man, Britain**

Banks turn to video tellers to cut costs

If Brian Bailey has his way, the next time you deposit a check or withdraw cash, you’ll be talking to a virtual teller. Thanks to a growing number of interactive teller machines, some area customers can now complete a number of financial transactions via two-way video that allows them to communicate with bank workers in remote locations. ****“It’s a great use of self-service technology but it’s also personal because you’re face-to-face, ****” said Brian Bailey, a vice president at NCR, a New York-based technology company that sells interactive tellers to financial institutions. As banks and credit unions continue to shutter branches to cut costs, video tellers have emerged as a less expensive way for them to provide face-to-face services to customers. Many financial institutions, particularly smaller ones, are turning to interactive tellers as a way to beef up their presence in certain areas — rural communities, say, or inside a city supermarket — without investing in a bricks-and-mortar location and on-site staff. ****Like ATMs, the machines perform basic transactions such as deposits and withdrawals. But they also come equipped with video and audio capabilities, as well as check scanners and signature pads to accommodate more nuanced requests. More than 400 of the company’s interactive tellers have been installed around the world since 2012. Revenue from interactive tellers is expected to more-than-double to $100 million this year. **“** There are a number of different applications, both in terms of bringing banking services to city locations as well as serving the rural population across the U.S.,” he said. Community banks and credit unions have been among the earliest to sign on, Bailey said. But now, about two years since NCR began offering interactive tellers, larger banking giants such as Bank of America and U.S. Bank have begun rolling out the technology. “Retail banks today are under quite a bit of pressure,” Bailey said. “This allows them to continue to provide services without adding the expenses of a traditional branch.” The number of bank branches in the Washington area has been falling in recent years as banks face higher regulatory costs. There were 1,750 branches in the metro area as of June 2013, 28 fewer than the year before, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (Nationally, 727 bank branches closed between mid-2012 and mid-2013.) Video tellers typically cost between $50,000 and $60,000, about the same as an ATM, Bailey said. **** At the State Employees Credit Union branch in College Park, members have been using interactive tellers for the past year. The credit union, which is headquartered in Linthicum, is using the new machines in a handful of branches, including one that opened last week in downtown Baltimore. **** “Customer reaction has been quite good,” said Peggy Tucker, senior vice president for member relations and branch operations at the credit union. “Members are easily adapting to the new technology.” The credit union’s four teller machines are manned by three employees who work in a central office at SECU’s headquarters. The arrangement is cheaper and more efficient than hiring additional employees at each location, Tucker said. “One of the biggest benefits of having the video teller is that we are able to offer expanded teller hours,” she said, adding that members can access the machines after-hours in the branch lobby. There are other upsides too, says Bailey: Say you want to withdraw more cash than the ATM allows, or want to cash a check down to the penny. (The teller machines come stocked with a range of coins and bills for this purpose, he said.) “Or if you have to do a number of complex transactions together — deposit a check, pay a bill and maybe get some cash back, that’s a set of transactions that’s much easier to do face-to-face,” he said. Still, he added, certain needs, such as opening a bank account or applying for a loan, must still be done in person. The machine “does 95 percent of what a teller can do inside the branch,” Bailey said. “But not everything.”

Bank tellers are the next blacksmiths

Self-driving cars. Self-serve gas pumps. Self-checkout supermarkets. Add self-banking to that list. No people. No tellers. Nobody greeting you with “How is your day going?” Although, that may come from a machine — and sooner than you think. Bank of America has opened three mini-bank branches since the new year that have ATMs and videoconferencing but no people. Two opened in Denver and one in Minneapolis. In addition to the ATMs, the new robo-banks — called automated centers — allow customers to make a videoconference call to a Bank of America employee at another location to discuss more complicated money issues. “This is the beginning of the end of the American bank branch,” said Peter Fitzgerald, a former U.S. senator from Illinois, lifelong banker and founder of Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, Va. “Bank branches are dead. They were killed by the iPhone. It’s like the horseshoe when the automobile came along.” According to figures compiled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and supplied by the American Bankers Association, the number of U.S. bank employees has remained relatively stable. There were 2,110,276 employees in 2012, and 2,043,480 last year. But the number of U.S. bank branches has declined precipitously from a peak of 99,540 in 2009 to 91,861 in the third quarter of 2016, according to the ABA. Bank of America spokeswoman Anne Pace said live banking isn’t disappearing. About 1 million people a day walk into one of Bank of America’s 4,597 locations and interact with bank employees. But the number of locations is down from 5,900 six years ago. The company has 16,000 automated teller machines. The robo-bank customers “can have a one-on-one conversation to get a mortgage, plan for retirement, open a small business or get a car loan,” she said. “This is just a test. We haven’t rolled these out extensively. We are going to see how these go, see what we learn and make a decision from there.” Pace said the new banks are not replacing existing locations. She also said Bank of America is adding 50 to 60 traditional centers. Word of the new robo-banks leaked out at a Credit Suisse conference in Miami on Tuesday during a question-and-answer session with Dean Athanasia of Bank of America’s consumer banking unit. There are no layoffs accompanying Bank of America’s robo-banks, but the new branches are part of a revolution in U.S. banking in the past few years as companies seek to save money by reducing the number of branches — and tellers and managers. Banks also are attempting to stay current with technology, which is moving toward handheld devices. “Cash is dying out,” Fitzgerald said. “Many millennials don’t carry cash. They only use their debit card. In 2011 and 2012, bank branch traffic dropped precipitously. The last I checked, 98.5 percent of our bank’s transactions are done online and electronically.” Robo-banking is also part of Bank of America’s strategy to expand its presence into harder-to-reach areas. At a fraction of the size of its traditional branches, the robo-banks save on real estate as well as personnel. Bank of America’s traditional branches run about 5,000 square feet. The robo-banks are about a quarter of that size. “There is no one-size-bank-fits-all anymore,” Pace said. “We have different centers based on different communities. We are taking some of that savings from mobile banking and reinvesting it into new centers, renovating others and hiring more specialists to provide advice and guidance to clients.” But the days of the local teller hanging around to make change or cash checks have been replaced by technology designed to service more robust profitmaking centers such as credit cards, mortgages and even retirement advice. “We are simply following our clients,” Pace said. “Mobile banking users increased to 21.6 million, and 19 percent of deposit transactions are done through mobile. That’s equivalent to 880 financial centers. We need to be there whether it’s through the mobile phone or inside a financial center.” Bank of America is working on voice recognition technology called Erica (as in Bank of Am-ERICA) that will allow people to do virtual banking by voice with a computer, much as people use Amazon Alexa to order books or Apple’s Siri to ask questions on an iPhone. The bank’s Merrill Edge investment service is also allowing customers to use a robo-advised platform to invest without speaking with a human. **Read more:** **84 Lumber and the big-budget Super Bowl ad to nowhere ** **Warren Buffett may have missed out on an amazing opportunity **

The long odds of starting a local bank: Recession, interest rates deplete ranks

It used to be easy to start a local bank: Find investors. Get a charter. Hire staff and appoint a board of directors. Off you go. Not anymore. A confluence of factors spawned by the Great Recession have combined to decimate the number of bank start-ups. Regulatory compliance is more expensive. Bank approvals have slowed to a crawl. Low interest rates have sapped profit margins. Loan demand has dropped. “It’s almost impossible to start a bank because you have to hire so many people to get it started,” said Bernard H. Clineburg, chairman and chief executive of McLean, Va.-based Cardinal Bank, which has $3.5 billion in assets and launched 15 years ago. “It’s not like when you get a charter, get your deposit and make a loan. The fun is gone. We used to help people succeed. It’s very hard now. The bottom line is it’s regulatory.” The number of independent commercial banks nationally dropped by 14 percent, or more than 800 institutions, from 2007 to 2013, “driven by an unprecedented collapse in new bank entry,” according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Some banks and financial institutions disappeared through gigantic mergers during the financial crisis, when JPMorgan Chase took over the assets of Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo absorbed Wachovia, and Bank of America swallowed Merrill Lynch. But the mergers aren’t the whole story. The number of newly formed banks has fallen from an average of about 100 a year since 1990 to three a year in the past five years. Most of that is because of the lack of new community banks, which generally start with less than $50 million in assets. (JPMorgan Chase, by comparison, has $2.5 trillion in assets.) The drop could have far-   reaching consequences for local businesses, many of which rely on small community banks for money. Clineburg was one of several Washington-area bank executives who discussed the lousy market for new banks. Several said we are on the downside of a typical economic cycle, which should reverse when conditions change. Others said the new regulations are justified. “Regulators have raised the bar,” said Shaza L. Andersen, chief executive of Reston-based WashingtonFirst Bank, which has 17 branches and $1.3 billion in assets. “Banks have hit a little bit of a bump, and regulators wanted to ensure that any bank that starts is bound to succeed.” Andersen said new bank formation will increase as the down cycle runs its course and demand picks up for more banking. “A lot of people think they can raise money and, ‘poof,’ they can open a bank,” she said. “But it takes a lot of expertise. I had to go through a lot of interviews and through a lot of screening before I got my charter in April 2004.” Banks have been closely regulated since the early days of U.S. commerce. Until the 1970s, they were barred from opening branches other than in their home states. And sometimes they were restricted even within a state. In Illinois, big banks such as First Chicago had to stay in Chicago, unable to open a branch in the suburbs, much less downstate. Restrictions were loosened in the 1970s, and the passage of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 opened up banking across state lines. The changes put local banks in competition with big national brands. And the number of independent banks fell from about 13,000 in 1960 to less than half that number before the financial crisis. Then the Great Recession hit. From 2009 through 2013, according to the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank report, new bank entries fell to almost zero. The Richmond report attributed the collapse of new banks entering the system to several factors, including the slim net interest margins. That margin is the revenue banks earn on the spread between how much it pays for deposits and how much it charges in interest. “When you combine that with a meaningful increase in the cost of doing business, more lawyers, cost of compliance, et cetera, it’s a difficult combination,” said Lee Sachs, co-founder and chairman of Chevy Chase-based Alliance Partners, a cooperative of community banks that finds and evaluates midsize business and corporate loans for its members. “Is it worth going through the effort of starting up a bank in this environment to get sub-optimal returns?” Chain Bridge Bank founder Peter G. Fitzgerald, a former U.S. senator from Illinois whose father helped pioneer branch banking in that state, said the answer is no. “Let’s say you are opening a new bank and have $20 million in capital,” he said. “The first day your bank opens, all you have is $20 million in capital. No deposits and no loans. “So you are going to invest that in safe, short-term instruments such as U.S. Treasury Bonds. If you go back a number of years, that $20 million would earn 6 percent annually and that would provide you with $1.25 million in revenue. So the first day you buy T-Bills and you already have $1.25 million in earnings and haven’t taken any risk.” At recent Treasury rates, that $20 million would earn about $45,800 in annual revenue. “With zero interest rates, opening a new bank doesn’t work,” said Fitzgerald, whose bank was one of the last to open before the financial crisis hit. “It’s the laws of humble arithmetic.” Community banks tend to give more personal service — especially to smaller, local businesses that want to work with a person who understands their company, their management abilities and what they are trying to accomplish. Small businesses want more from a banker than someone checking boxes based on some computer printout of their financials. “There needs to be a story” to those businesses, said Joseph S. Bracewell, chairman of Washington First Bankshares. “Maybe the business is relatively new and maybe to finance the business, you need to take a lien on the owners’ loan. “If you have a small- to medium-size business that requires financing for real estate or working capital or whatever,” he said, “a smaller, community bank will of necessity be equipped because their lifeblood is dealing with smaller businesses.” Sachs said Alliance Partners and its cooperative of community banks help fill some gaps created by the evolution in banking. “As a hypothetical example, 20 years ago, if you were a farmer in Kansas and wanted to buy a tractor, you would walk into a Kansas savings bank and ask for a $25,000 loan,” he said. “Today, you walk into a John Deere store and they say, ‘Here is your tractor and here is your loan.’ The Kansas savings bank has been cut out of the tractor lending business. But the treasurer of John Deere has to borrow money to make those loans. He borrows hundreds of millions of dollars. He can do business with us, and we can effectively get our banks back in that business.” Either way, the long-term trend toward fewer banks may not reverse itself, which Bracewell said is not a bad thing. “Fifteen thousand banks in the 1970s was too many,” he said. They had difficulty distinguishing themselves. Some merged or failed as technology made face-to-face banking less important. Even so, Bracewell considers himself an old-fashioned banker. As he put it: “At 68, I still like to go to the bank and hand my deposit to a teller.”

The region’s banks flock to a new market: The District

After 147 years in Olney, Sandy Spring Bank made a landmark announcement this month: It would open a branch in the District. For more than a century, the community bank, which handles $2.5 billion in local deposits, has been based 25 miles away in suburban Maryland. It has 37 branches in Maryland and seven Northern Virginia, but had long shied away from expanding into the Nation’s Capital. “Maryland, Virginia and D.C. were, in the past, viewed as very different and separate markets,” said Daniel Schrider, president and chief executive of Sandy Spring Bank. “The Potomac River was a barrier folks didn’t want to cross.” But that is changing as younger — and more moneyed — residents move into the District. Community banks from nearby suburbs are expanding into downtown Washington eager to secure deposits and dole out mortgages and small business loans. Last week, United Bankshares announced it is buying Bank of Georgetown for $269 million, effectively doubling its presence in the District. A total of 35 banks now hold deposits in the District, up from 24 in 2000, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “What we’ve had is 10 years of young professionals with above-average incomes moving into the District,” said Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. “That has changed the nature of banking.” Deposits at District banks have more than doubled to $45.12 billion in the last 10 years and nearly quadrupled since 2000, according to FDIC data. The District is increasingly drawing a larger chunk of the region’s money, as well. Deposits in D.C. now make up 21 percent of deposits in the greater metropolitan area, up from 16 percent in 2010. “The demographics of Washington have changed quite a bit as urban living has become more attractive and, frankly, as it’s become more expensive to live in the District,” said Bert Ely, a financial consultant based in Alexandria. “That means you draw more higher-income customers that make for good bank customers.” The District’s population grew nearly 10 percent to about 660,000 between 2010 and 2014, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. (The national population, by comparison, grew about 3 percent in that same period.) Washington has never been much of a banking town, Ely said. For one, it never had the kind of industrial and commercial activity that allowed banks to flourish in cities such as New York, Pittsburgh or Baltimore. Until the mid-1980s, interstate banking laws also made it difficult for banks to spread from one jurisdiction into another, Ely said. Instead of limiting themselves to the District, many banks opted to set up either in Maryland or Virginia, where they would be able to expand throughout the state, unfettered. The one big exception was Riggs Bank, which was founded in the District in 1836 and for decades served as Washington’s largest bank, catering to its many embassies. But it had its share of scandals and, in 2005, was purchased by PNC Financial Services. “Washington was always missing that element of homegrown private industry, which is why you never had a really significant center city banking industry,” he said. “There was a vacuum that is just now being filled.” By the time Bank of Georgetown was founded in 2005, young professionals had begun moving into the city in large numbers. The bank positioned itself to cater to that demographic by designing modern branches with flat-screen televisions and coffee stations. “We know the world is changing, and young adults are the future so we better pay attention to them,” Mike Fitzgerald, the bank’s chief executive, told The Washington Post in 2013. “When we wake up tomorrow, they’re going to be the captains of industry.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Now Sandy Spring Bank is also hoping to woo young District residents with an upcoming branch at 1299 Pennsylvania Ave. NW scheduled to open in early 2016. “It just makes sense to finally put offices in the District,” Schrider said. “It’s probably overdue for us to be in Washington.”

Neighborhood profile: Kettering, a Maryland community standing tall in tough times

Long considered one of Prince George’s County’s most stable middle-class communities, the Kettering neighborhood still felt the effects of the recent economic downturn. But even during those difficult years, when some residents lost jobs and others struggled to retain or maintain their properties, community leader Phil Lee never lost faith. Lee, the executive director of the Kettering Civic Federation and a 24-year resident of the community, said he knew that his neighbors’ family-based values would pull them through the difficult times. “It was the most trying time of my life . . . but that three-or-four-year period made me even more proud to live here,” he said, adding that he “spent a lot of time helping families, telling them it would end one day, that the storm would be over.” At a time when the community’s residential vacancy rate was 1.9 percent, according to census data, Lee’s federation took a proactive approach. Members made sure lawns were mowed at vacant homes and encouraged financially strapped families to keep up their properties. “We’d say, let’s find out what we can do collectively to make it work,” Lee said. “If you can’t afford to paint the front and the back of the house, paint the front. If you can’t afford to cut the grass in the back or the front, cut the front.” That neighborhood pride shows through to this day in the community of about 12,000. One of the first outer-Beltway suburbs in Prince George’s, Kettering is now pushing middle age, and its ramblers and split-levels are modestly sized compared with houses in newer subdivisions that share the Upper Marlboro mailing address. But the properties are generally well maintained, and the subdivision’s winding, sidewalk-lined streets feature a mix of townhouses and single-family homes that appeal to a broad market, including young families. Home buyers are attracted by neighborhood schools, recreational facilities, convenient shopping and the surrounding major highways that allow residents to get around. **Emphasis on youth:** Residents support many initiatives that benefit the neighborhood’s younger people. “I often judge a community by the children when they grow up,” said Lee, 60, who raised three children in Kettering. Lee works with the nonprofit Olde Mill Foundation, which operates C-PAC, an organization that has sponsored programs ranging from anti-truancy to conflict resolution. “Our goal is to keep youth out of trouble and learn how to live in the community,” Lee said. The Kettering-Largo-Mitchellville Boys and Girls Club provides an outlet for children. Kettering resident Tyrone Patterson, who served as club president for more than 20 years and remains a board member, says that residents throughout the community attend the organization’s fall homecoming celebration. The sports teams offer a way for new families to meet their neighbors. “It’s a way for people to forge relationships,” he said. “A lot of times, the kids go to school together, but the parents don’t know each other.” Club members lobbied the Maryland- National Capital Park and Planning Commission to construct the Largo/Perrywood/Kettering Community Center adjacent to Perrywood Elementary School and provided considerable input on the design, said Patterson, 62, whose grown daughter now serves as the center’s director. The efforts to lobby for the center “made a lot of parents aware of the needs of the community,” Patterson said. “It got people to band together and do it.” The club’s latest project with the commission involves refurbishing a 200-year-old home, the Chelsea house, for use as a storage facility and future center for community outreach. Patterson says the club has raised about $450,000 for the project, which he estimated may cost $1.2 million. **Living there:** Kettering is roughly bordered by Central Avenue to the north, Watkins Park Drive to the east, Largo Road to the south and Campus Way South to the west. (The neighborhood includes houses on the east side of Watkins Park Drive.) The community was developed in the late 1960s and early ’70s by Albert Turner, whose company constructed several Prince George’s suburbs and still operates shopping centers adjacent to Kettering. Prince George’s Community College lies just across Route 202, and the sprawling, 850-acre Watkins Regional Park, which borders the east side of Kettering, includes ball fields, picnic areas and a nature center. The community has about 5,000 homes, and about a quarter of those structures are townhouses. That varied housing stock provides options for homeowners entering the market as well as families looking for larger quarters. A three-to-four-bedroom home with a basement could range from the $180,000s to the high $200,000s, said Alethia Head, an agent with Long & Foster. Many of the single-family homes are occupied by families with two or more children, while the townhouses attract single buyers, single parents, or couples with one child, Head said. “Renovations play a big part in prices,” she said, noting that the highest-priced home currently on the market, at $335,000, has been extensively renovated. Sixteen homes are now for sale — eight townhomes and eight single-family homes, ranging from $172,000 to $335,000. Twelve homes were under contract, at $125,000 to $319,900. There were 43 sales in the past 12 months, with prices between $76,000 and $340,000. **Crime:** Theft and burglary are the most frequent crimes reported in Kettering, according to online incident reports provided by Prince George’s County police. About 60 thefts were reported in April, May and June (the most recent statistics provided), and 22 burglaries were reported during that period, along with about a dozen auto thefts and seven assaults. The community remains shaken, however, by the August 2012 home-invasion slaying of high school student Amber Stanley. The crime remains unsolved. “That was the crime of the century. People still talk about it,” Lee said. “I tell people that we can’t change what happened, but we need to realize we need to be more vigilant. Tragedy can strike anywhere.” **Schools:** Kettering and Perrywood elementary schools, Kettering Middle, and Largo High. **Transit:** The neighborhood is served by county transit and Metrobus, and the Largo Metrorail station is minutes away, adjacent to the Beltway. A Six Flags amusement park and FedEx Field are short drives from Kettering. **Jim Brocker** is a freelance writer.

A guide to breaking up with your bank

You’ve decided: It’s time to ditch your bank. But are you ready to make the switch? There are plenty of reasons for wanting to change banks. Maybe you’re fed up with paying ATM fees, so you want a bank with branches closer to home or work. Or you found an account with a credit union or a smaller bank that promises better customer service or charges fewer fees.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Whatever the deciding factor, many people who think about changing banks end up staying put — often because of worries about the work involved. “It takes a little bit of time and effort,” says Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com. “There’s a natural tendency to cringe at the thought of it.” Indeed, people who aren’t careful when they make the change can face steep fees for missed payments, unnecessary money transfers and overdrafts. Here are some tips for breaking up with your bank: **Tell your current bank what’s coming.** This gives them a chance to let you know of any new offerings that might match what you’re looking for, says Mike Townsend, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association. It also lays the groundwork for closing the account, which can take a few days to a few months.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Open the new account.** That’s right, before you close the old one. This gives you time to set up direct deposit and to give merchants your new billing information.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Don’t close the old account right away.** While you should stop using your old checking account right away, you should keep it open for at least another 30 days while you transition to the new account, says Mike Moebs, economist and chief executive of Moebs Services. “Sixty days is better,” he says. Some banks even charge fees for closing accounts before a certain amount of time, according to Bankrate.com.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Ask for a switch kit.** Your new bank or credit union may offer what’s called a “switch kit,” a step-by-step checklist of the forms you’ll need to transition to your new account, Townsend says. That will include letters for setting up direct deposit and forms that can make it easier to redirect automatic payments being charged to the checking account. These kits can be obtained online, in the branch or through the mail.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Make sure all automatic bills are moved over.** Keep any eye out for any bills still being charged to your old account and update the payment information, Moebs says. Make sure direct deposit and other transactions are clearing smoothly through your new account. Alex Matjanec, co-founder of MyBankTracker.com, recommends checking the past year’s worth of statements to create a list of transactions that may come up. Some examples of bills to watch for: utilities, credit cards, loans, gym memberships and payments that may come up once or twice a year like charitable donations and insurance payments.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Move over whatever cash is left.** After 30 days or so of zero activity on your old checking account, have the remaining balance transferred to your new account, says McBride of Bankrate.com. Transfers from one financial institution to another are typically handled through the what’s known as the Automatic Clearing House, or ACH, an electronic process that normally takes three business days — or five regular days if you put the request in on a Friday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Get written confirmation.** Ask your old bank or credit union to give you a letter that confirms the account was closed, Matjanec says. You should also cut up old debit cards and checkbooks to be sure you don’t inadvertently use them later, he says.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read more:**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico How to save a down payment for a home    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico People who get 401(k) advice are better savers. Too bad many people don’t get advice.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Retirement mistakes people make at every age    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

What presidential scholars say we might hear in Obama’s farewell address

When President Obama addresses the country Tuesday night in Chicago, the place where he launched his political career, presidential scholars say he will face a unique moment, unlike perhaps any modern president before him: He will be giving this milestone address just as his signature legislative achievement is threatened to be undone. As a result, the opportunity also exists for a unique farewell address, a rhetorical device that has been used by many but not all presidents to recap their tenure, help solidify their legacy and address the future. And it could have something in common with what scholars say are among the best farewell speeches -- the departing remarks from George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, in particular: a cautionary warning, one that is hard-earned from a turn in the seat of being the ruler of the free world. Unlike inaugural addresses, which tend to be visionary and future-oriented, or state of the union remarks, which lay out a policy agenda, farewell addresses typically get neither the attention nor the consistency of other key presidential speeches. Some presidents make their final remarks as part of their last State of the Union, while others, says University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, offer several speeches toward the end of their presidency about a single topic of importance but not distinctive farewell speech. "Lyndon B. Johnson went on what amounted to a farewell binge," she noted, with multiple speeches about the problems in Vietnam. Others, such as Richard Nixon, never offer formal ones. "This is a fairly complex piece of rhetoric. If the inaugural invests you with the presidency, the farewell divests you, rhetorically. It transitions you back into the role of a citizen." Obama is likely to speak about the economic progress of the country since he took office amid the financial crisis and Great Recession. And he will probably note other achievements, as well as try to offer hope to a demoralized Democratic party in the wake of its election defeat. In addition, "I think he's going to want to talk about the future, and how many Americans are taking democracy for granted," said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.  Presidents also tend to discuss their key accomplishments in farewell speeches as a way of cementing their legacy or seeding for historians what they thought was important, and scholars anticipate that tonight's speech will be similar. But Obama's case will face a unique challenging of touting his signature legislative achievement -- the Affordable Care Act -- as Republicans work to undo it. "I can’t remember an address where a president is in that situation," Jamieson said.   Yet he also said he wanted to warn Americans "in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy." With a divided nation, Obama could choose to refer to those words from Washington.   Indeed, even as Truman left the job, he seemed particularly in awe of it, saying there is "no job like it on the face of the earth" and noting "the power which is concentrated here at this desk, and in the responsibility and difficulty of the decisions." He wanted to share that difficulty with American citizens, offering another sentiment Obama could echo in tonight's speech. "I want all of you to realize how big a job, how hard a job, it is — not for my sake, because I am stepping out of it — but for the sake of my successor," Truman said. "He needs the understanding and the help of every citizen. It is not enough for you to come out once every four years and vote for a candidate, and then go back home and say, 'Well, I've done my part, now let the new President do the worrying.' He can't do the job alone."

Move your money, move society?

Greg Akili had just finished paying for his $9 tuna melt at a diner in South Central Los Angeles when his waiter lingered to chat. Akili’s debit card — featuring a painting of a black youth wearing a hoodie and the famous image of the 1968 Olympic medalists, heads bowed, fists raised — had caught the young man’s eye. For the third time that day, Akili lit up and launched into a conversation he’s been having daily, with strangers and friends alike. The 68-year-old community organizer waved his hands in the direction of his new bank about five blocks up Crenshaw Boulevard: OneUnited, the largest black-owned bank in the country. “I’ve been trying to convince as many people as I can to open up accounts with black banks and invest in our own community,” Akili said, recounting the recent interaction. “I talk about this almost every time I use my card.” This new card is part of a rescue effort for black banks that was launched with much fanfare last summer. But the campaign is going to need heroic measures if it is really going to save black financial institutions. The aim of the movement is clear: bolster black banks — and in the process, uplift a community that has been systematically marginalized for generations. By “banking black,” organizers say, African Americans have the power to help each other buy homes, build businesses and create jobs — markers of wealth that have eluded a disproportionate number of blacks. But many of these banks are struggling to survive in the wake of the financial collapse. And despite a spate of celebrity endorsements, the drive to deliver meaningful equality by reviving financial institutions remains a long shot. Forty-two percent of African Americans own their homes, compared with 72 percent of whites, according to 2016 Census Bureau data. Nearly a fifth of black households do not even use banks, compared with 3 percent of white households, the FDIC reports. The continued disparity in access to financial services exposes black families to loan sharks charging exorbitant interest rates and fees, which can trap borrowers in a cycle of debt. “It’s a challenge to build up the financial assets of this community,” said Russell Kashian, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater whose research focuses on minority-owned banks. “Efforts to get depositors in there will augment the profits and sustainability of these banks. But if people don’t support them, these communities can become bank deserts.” There are 23 black banks today — far fewer than during segregation, when they were the only option for many African Americans. Their combined assets total just $5.5 billion, a small fraction of the assets of banking behemoth Wells Fargo, which has $1.9 trillion. After 30 years of banking with Wells Fargo, Akili made the switch to OneUnited in February, the same month the bank announced a partnership with Black Lives Matter and debuted its debit card depicting the youth in the hoodie. Cardholders can make automatic, regular donations to Black Lives Matter, founded after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The first black-owned bank to offer Internet banking, OneUnited was well positioned to take advantage of the #BankBlack wave with its mobile and online services. The Boston-based bank with branches in Los Angeles and Miami added $6.7 million in deposits in the second half of 2016, according to FDIC records. It went from opening an average of 50 new accounts a day to more than 1,000 a day, said Teri Williams, the bank’s president and chief operating officer. “It reflects a change in the understanding of the power of our dollars,” Williams said, “and the fact that we need to use our money more purposefully.” Fresh off a tour in March, Michael Render sauntered into a bank tucked into a shopping complex in a leafy neighborhood on the southwest side of Atlanta. The 41-year-old rap artist, professionally known as Killer Mike, was exhausted after performing in 36 cities over six weeks, but he had a cause to promote. Render, an early advocate of the #BankBlack movement, was hoping to persuade potential customers in his home town to move their money from mainstream banks. The rapper arrived at the branch of Citizens Trust Bank without an entourage and spent 45 minutes shaking hands. He shared his own experience of getting rejected by large white-run institutions for loans for his chain of barbershops. A black bank, he told visitors, is more likely to approve loans to grow his business because it understands the cultural significance of barber shops. He has used black banks his whole life, following the example of his grandparents, who raised him. “I am making sure my community will have institutions that will lend them money to start businesses and have mortgages,” Render said later in a phone interview. “Nobody is going to swoop in and save the African American community. The community has to take care of itself.” By the end of the day — with Render’s help — Citizens Trust had netted 40 new accounts. Render is credited with having steered thousands to open accounts at black banks. Last July, after the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Render called in to an MTV and BET town hall and told the audience not to riot in the streets but to “take our warfare to financial institutions.” Solange Knowles, Usher, Charlamagne Tha God and other celebrities also joined the bank movement to protest the long string of police killings of black citizens — 50 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted black Americans to reject violence and harness their collective economic might to strengthen black banks. Render’s goal at the time was to get 1 million Americans to deposit $100 each in a black bank. Within five days, Citizens Trust reported almost $1 million in deposits. By December, the bank had 10 times as many new accounts as it did in 2015, according to Citizens Trust; the 9,600 new accounts yielded $13 million in deposits. Large mainstream banks launched their own efforts to win back African Americans customers. Wells Fargo, which has a branch in Atlanta across the parking lot from Citizens Trust, recently announced a $60 billion mortgage lending goal to increase the number of black homeowners. But Render, like many others, is skeptical. Wells Fargo, the largest home mortgage originator in the country, had previously paid $175 million to settle a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit accusing the bank of steering thousands of black and Hispanic borrowers into subprime mortgages and charging them higher fees and rates than white borrowers with similar credit profiles. “If major corporations are swooping in out of nowhere and saying, ‘Hey, we have this for your people,’ it’s because they see you doing it for yourself,” Render said. Despite high aspirations, the #BankBlack campaign has produced mixed results. Many of the banks, from Chicago to Durham, N.C., experienced an immediate surge in deposits last summer when activists launched a text-message campaign calling on individuals to move their money into black banks — only to see the funds ebb away by the end of the year. Half of the banks, including Citizens Trust, ended 2016 with a drop in deposits, compared with when the push began last July, according to an analysis of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data. Eleven banks lost money. One — Seaway Bank in Chicago — went out of business in January. “A lot of these banks need a lot of work across the board. We don’t want to bank black arbitrarily and bank bad,” said Robert Herring, one of the co- founders of BankBlackUSA, a grass-roots group that formed over social media last summer. “We can’t say, ‘Hey, everyone jump ship,’ and the new ship has holes in it.” Black banks reflect the economic profiles of their customer base, analysts and bank executives say. Located predominantly in working-class neighborhoods, they cater to a clientele many of whom may not meet the credit requirements of mainstream financial institutions. Black banks, on average, are five times as likely as traditional big banks to back mortgages for properties in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, according to the FDIC. **** As a result, they were hit hardest by the recession, when a disproportionate share of African Americans lost their jobs and could not make their loan payments. “When the American economy catches a cold, that means African Americans have pneumonia,” said B. Doyle Mitchell Jr., president and CEO of the black-owned Industrial Bank, with was started by his grandfather in the District in 1934. Those economic realities make black-run institutions more vulnerable to financial shocks, even as they balance risk and profit goals with their mission of lifting the black community. OneUnited drew the ire of Boston’s black community when it foreclosed on a historic black church that failed to repay its loan. The years-long proceedings ended in court, where a federal bankruptcy judge ruled in the bank’s favor. Many black banks, including Industrial, do not judge loan applicants on credit scores alone; they also take into account life’s hiccups like a divorce or car accident, as well as individual character and financial plans, Mitchell said. But black banks, like all banks, are ultimately in the business of making money. “Can a black person just walk into a black bank and expect to get a loan? Absolutely not,” Mitchell said. “We have to be prudent in the decisions that we make. We are a business, not a charitable organization.” Even so, Industrial modified home loans and dropped interest rates to help customers through the recession instead of resorting to foreclosures, Mitchell said. Other black banks introduced products tailored to customers with checkered credit histories. Citizens Trust launched the “Privilege card” in November for customers with poor credit scores, charging higher interest but offering the opportunity to rebuild credit instead of borrowing from pawnshops. Liberty Bank in New Orleans partnered with U.S. Black Chambers Inc. on a low-interest credit card. But while the #BankBlack movement helped Industrial gain about 5,000 new accounts between last July and December, Mitchell said simply depositing $100 into a savings account would not make a difference to a bank’s long-term viability. “You can’t just give black banks your piggy bank,” Mitchell said. Advocates of the #BankBlack movement acknowledge they are competing against banking giants with larger branch networks, extensive marketing and often superior technology. “When the doors of integration opened, we thought we were always going to get better services or products with the white institutions, and black banks became the banks of last resort,” said Michael Grant, president of the National Bankers Association, a lobbying group for minority-owned banks. Black banks peaked at more than 100 during the Jim Crow era. Their decline accelerated with the Great Recession, dropping from 44 in 2007 to 23 today after banks were forced to merge or close. William Michael Cunningham, a Washington-based analyst who specializes in minority-owned banks, predicts there will be seven left by 2028. A sustained #BankBlack movement can slow that decline, he said but not reverse it. “It helps the banks out. But it will not move the needle in the long term,” said Cunningham, the chief executive of Creative Investment Research. To survive, black banks must expand beyond their historic base in the African American community. Chiké Okonkwo, an actor who stars in the BET series “Being Mary Jane,” said the campaign welcomes anyone who “wants to use their privilege to benefit others.” About a quarter to a third of the customers at black-owned banks are not black, and several banks are pushing aggressively to diversify their clientele, according to the National Bankers Association. UAW-Ford made headlines in November when the union deposited $1.5 million with First Independence, a black-owned bank in Detroit. Temple Israel, a Reform Jewish synagogue in Boston, is exploring the idea of encouraging its 4,000-member congregation to open personal accounts at OneUnited. The bank president is slated to meet with the congregation in April. “We teach that organized people and organized money is power,” said Matt Soffer, a rabbi at Temple Israel. “And if there is a movement to organize money to uplift these communities that have been systematically oppressed, anything we can do to help people grow their economy is the definition of justice in the most Jewish sense.” Activism gives Americans the opportunity to confront their darkest history, said Okonkwo, who played a freedom-fighting slave in “The Birth of a Nation,” the 2016 movie about Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia slave rebellion. Okonkwo says he takes time every day to educate the baristas and gas station attendants he encounters in Los Angeles — or any cashier who comments on his visually striking debit card — about why he moved his money to a black-owned bank. “If you’re a white ally of Black Lives Matter or any person who thinks it’s wrong that black people in America are still facing some of the issues that Martin Luther King was facing in the 1960s,” he said, “then put your money where your mouth is.”

Bank of America hopes underwater homeowners become renters to avoid foreclosure

If you’re seriously underwater and headed to foreclosure, what would you say if the lender suddenly offered you the chance to remain in your home as a tenant for an extended period plus have your mortgage debt wiped away? Would you say yes? Or would you instead conclude: Hey, why pay rent? It’s going to take the bank more than a year to complete the foreclosure and evict us, so why not just stay put and save some money? One of the country’s largest banks is about to find out which choice significant numbers of distressed owners make in response to a new foreclosure-avoidance plan it calls “mortgage-to-lease.” Bank of America is sending proposals later this month to upward of 1,000 customers in Arizona, New York and Nevada. If the reaction is positive, the program is likely to be expanded to other states, and it could become a model for the biggest players in the mortgage market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here’s how it works: The homeowners in the initial pilot tests have all previously been offered a variety of alternatives to foreclosure: loan modifications, forbearance on payments, short sales and “deeds-in-lieu,” where the borrower hands the property title back to the bank and moves out. But these homeowners either have not been able to qualify or have not responded to the bank’s proposals. They’re now essentially at the end of the line: There are no other standard lender remedies available to keep them out of foreclosure. In fact, most lenders are now speeding up the pace of foreclosures to get heavy loads of defaulted mortgages off their books. In the mortgage-to-lease plan, a borrower is expected to deed back his home to the bank; in exchange, he gets multiyear lease terms at or slightly below the going market rent for the unit, provided he has monthly income to make the payments. When the lease expires, there is no guarantee that he will have a shot at repurchasing the home. Bank of America officials acknowledge they are unsure how many homeowners will take them up on the offer. “This is an experiment — we just don’t know,” said Dave Steckel, the bank’s home retention strategy executive. It’s entirely possible, he concedes, that some owners will simply choose to proceed to foreclosure. The plan has clear benefits for Bank of America. Since foreclosures generally trigger deeper losses to lenders than deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure, the bank gets back troubled properties at lower costs. Since it intends to sell those houses to investment groups as rentals with income-qualified tenants already living on the premises, the bank expects to obtain overall higher returns than it would by selling them as vacant, post-foreclosure units. Though Bank of America has not discussed details of the plan with foreclosure-prevention and homeownership advocates, leaders of some groups had generally positive reactions to the concept. “I’m glad to see the [lending] industry moving in this direction and away from their usual ‘Foreclosure; you’re gone; goodbye,’ ” said Colleen Hernandez, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Homeownership Preservation Foundation, which runs a hotline and counseling service that assisted 200,000 consumers last year. Not only might a mortgage-to-lease approach keep families in their homes, she said, but it should help neighborhoods by cutting down on the number of vacant, deteriorating properties that create blight and depress real estate values. Hernandez’s main concerns with mortgage-to-lease concepts — she emphasized that she has not seen details of Bank of America’s version — are that they need to “offer an agreed-upon path back to homeownership” at the end of the lease period and that they should provide advance counseling for borrowers. Bank of America officials say their plan does not rule out repurchases but leaves that to the discretion of the investor. David Berenbaum, chief program officer for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit umbrella group, called mortgage-to-lease “a very compelling idea,” but only if the lender “has exhausted every other option” to keep people in their houses. Where is this all headed and how fast? It’s uncertain at this stage, but if Bank of America’s pilot projects go well, with both consumers and investors enthusiastic, look for mortgage-to-lease to spread to other large lenders fast, potentially becoming a new tool in the national foreclosure-avoidance effort.

Banks to payday lenders: Quit the business or we’ll close your account

Al LePage has been issuing payday loans out of a suburban Minneapolis storefront for most of the past decade. But on Valentine’s Day, a Wells Fargo banker called and gave him 30 days to cease and desist — or risk losing his bank account. “The only explanation I got was since they’re not doing payroll advances anymore, they didn’t want to have customers providing similar loans,” said LePage, owner of Al’$ Check Cashing. “But I run a legal business.” LePage is part of a wave of payday lenders who say they are being persecuted by banks at the behest of federal regulators. Already under siege by the Obama administration for flouting state laws, payday lenders now face a more subtle but potentially devastating assault from banks threatening to cut off their access to the financial system unless they stop offering the high-interest, small-dollar loans. Republicans in Congress say the administration is abusing its regulatory powers to shut down legitimate businesses. In August, 31 GOP lawmakers accused the Department of Justice and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of “intimidating” banks and payment processors to “terminate business relationships with lawful lenders.” Last month, in a hearing before a Senate Banking subcommittee on consumer protection, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) complained that several payday lenders in his home state had been dumped by their banks in recent months. “There is a determined effort, from [the Justice Department] to the regulators . . . to cut off credit and use other tactics to force [payday lenders] out of business,” Vitter said. “I find that deeply troubling because it has no statutory basis, no statutory authority.” Federal regulators deny waging a concerted campaign to force banks to sever ties with the lenders. ****“If you have relationships with a [payday lending] business operating in compliance with the law and you’re managing those relationships and risks properly, we neither prohibit nor discourage banks providing services to that customer,” said Mark Pearce, director of the FDIC’s Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection. But the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency both recently warned banks against offering a payday-like loan known as a “direct-deposit advance,” in which banks give customers quick cash in exchange for authority to draw repayment directly from their paychecks or disability benefits. All six large banks that offered the service, including Wells Fargo, got out of the business earlier this year. The regulators also told banks to expect greater scrutiny of clients ****who offer such loans, prompting some bankers to complain that they are being forced to police their customers. “Banks are being told that the relationships expose the bank to a high degree of reputational, compliance and legal risk,” said Viveca Ware, executive vice president of regulatory policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group. In one e-mail sent to Vitter —redacted to conceal the identities of the bank and the borrower — a banker told one payday lender that, “based on your performance, there’s no way we shouldn’t be a credit provider.” The banker continued: “Our only issue is, and it has always been, the space in which you operate. It is the scrutiny that you, and now that we, are under.” Bank regulators have long cast a wary eye on alternative financial service providers like payday lenders, who typically charge triple-digit interest rates and balloon payments that consumer advocates say trap borrowers in a cycle of debt. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia ban the loans outright, while another nine limit interest rates and usage. But the $7.4 billion payday lending industry has come under increasing scrutiny as more companies move their operations online, allowing some to skirt state regulations. Under President Obama, that watchfulness has extended to traditional banks that do business with payday lenders. Prosecutors are investigating whether banks have enabled online lenders to withdraw money illegally from borrowers’ checking accounts in a bid to boost their own take from payment-processing fees and customer refund requests. Over the past year, Justice has issued dozens of subpoenas to banks and third-party processors as part of “Operation Choke Point,” an effort to block scammers’ access to the financial system. Justice officials say the effort is aimed at addressing fraud, not hindering legitimate payday lending. Advocacy groups — and many Democrats — have questioned whether banks should be doing business at all with short-term, high-cost lenders. Reinvestment Partners, a consumer group, found that traditional banks have provided nearly $5.5 billion in lines of credit and term loans in the past **decade** to payday lenders, pawn shops and rent-to-own companies. “It’s really frustrating that high-cost lenders can exist because of nationally regulated banks,” said Adam Rust, the group’s director of research. “I don’t think banks should be allowed to sit back in the shadows and allow predatory lending to continue to occur in our neighborhoods.” Doing business with companies that inflict such harm could damage a bank’s reputation and leave it vulnerable to litigation, regulators have said. But LePage, of Al’$ Check Cashing, said not every short-term lender takes advantage of people. He said his company charged, at most, $26 for a $350 loan. And although many customers did roll one loan into another — a practice that can trap consumers in debt — LePage said he monitored such activity and made the risks clear. “We’ve never had a complaint filed against us, because we treat our customers fairly,” he said. “Shutting down our payday line just means a lot of people will either have no access to money they need or they’ll go online, which isn’t any better.” After he got the call from Wells Fargo, LePage said he complained to the state attorney general and the Commerce Department, as well as the bank’s chief regulator. Wells Fargo declined to comment on LePage’s case. But spokesman Jim Seitz said bank officials “recognize the need for an extra level of review and monitoring to ensure these customers do business in a responsible way.” In the end, LePage said he gave up and shut his payday business down. “Because I’m licensed through the state of Minnesota, I have to have my rates posted on the wall, and any banker that came in to visit could see them and cut me off,” LePage said. “I don’t want to take that chance.”

Let’s toss out home equity loans

Here’s a conundrum. Our society encourages homeownership — it’s the American dream! —in a variety of ways. But it also encourages us to load up our homes with debt, which, as the financial crisis vividly demonstrated, can result in the loss of homeownership. It’s time for us to choose: a home as a societal ideal or a home as a cash machine. Over the past few decades, banks have spent billions marketing home equity lines of credit. This changed the image of such loans from a socially unacceptable sign of financial distress — respectable people paid off their mortgages — to a savvy move. Remember Citi’s “Live Richly” campaign? Or PNC Bank’s advertisement that promised the “easiest way to haul money out of your house”? In the 1990s, subprime mortgages began to proliferate. These, too, mainly allowed people to withdraw equity from their homes, although they were marketed to people with impaired credit. While the target customers for the banks and the early subprime lenders may have been slightly different, their loans had this in common: They were aggressively marketed, and the government encouraged this type of lending by allowing some tax deductibility of the interest on home equity loans. As the housing bubble grew, home equity loans soared and risky mortgages proliferated. Most subprime loans were “cash out refinancings,” a close cousin of a home equity loan in which you refinance your mortgage for more than you currently owe, then pocket the difference. We borrow against our homes for frivolous as well as important purposes, such as starting a business. But here’s the thing: In either case, the borrowing is antithetical to our stated goal of homeownership — which, after all, is a goal because it’s supposed to foster roots in a community, and increase stability and financial security. It’s almost the same as if the government promoted retirement savings by allowing you to save tax free (as it does) but then also encouraged you to raid your 401(k) when necessary. The notion of homeownership is probably too ingrained in our psyche to kill that off. So let’s abolish home equity loans, or at least go back to the old days, when they were the loan of last resort. **Bethany McLean** , a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is co-author with Joe Nocera of “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.”

Fair housing group: Bank of America foreclosed homes in white neighborhoods are better maintained than those in black and Latino neighborhoods

Chevelle Bushnell has written to her homeowners association about the trash, debris and overgrown shrubbery at the vacant townhouse next door to her home in District Heights, Md.  She’s called police repeatedly to report break-ins, including one in which thieves cut through the wall of the vacant townhouse to get inside her home. “Pretty much I have had to secure my house with cameras,” said Bushnell, who has lived in the Prince George’s County community for 26 years. “They need to fix this house and sell it. I am sure there are people interested.” The vacant townhouse, in a predominantly African American neighborhood and county, is an example of how banks fail to secure and maintain foreclosed homes in black and Latino neighborhoods, fair housing advocates say. The home is featured in a discrimination complaint filed Wednesday with the Department of Housing and Urban Development against Bank of America, alleging that the bank has neglected foreclosed homes it owns in minority neighborhoods and has done a better job of maintaining those in white communities. The National Fair Housing Alliance filed new evidence in an existing federal Fair Housing Act complaint against the bank, after taking an in-depth look at neighborhoods in 30 metropolitan areas across the country, including Prince George’s. The group said it found a “continued failure by Bank of America” to conduct simple maintenance such grass mowing and securing of doors and windows in minority neighborhoods. Residents and civil rights groups say failure to maintain foreclosed properties contributes to blight and decay and presents safety problems in affected neighborhoods. Some residents feel unsafe walking on streets with boarded-up homes and homes that have broken windows and unsecured doors. The blight also hurts property values of the other homes. “In communities of color, Bank of America simply ignores the routine basic maintenance,” said Shanna L. Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “It is amazing how nice the homes are in the neighborhood, and then you come right up to this eyesore that is a Bank of America foreclosure.” The NFHA’s complaint is based on an investigation of 1,267  foreclosed Bank of America properties in working- and middle-class neighborhoods across the country. The complaint is similar to those that civil rights advocates have made against other big banks and housing finance giant Fannie Mae. “All these banks say they have procedures, but you can look at our photographs and see that that’s an absolute lie,” Smith said. “They simply refuse to maintain their foreclosures in communities of color.” Bank of America, in a statement, questioned the credibility of the claims, saying that previous reports by the NFHA had serious flaws in methodology. “Bank of America has a strong track record and uniform policies for properly maintaining and marketing properties, yet NFHA has continuously presented inaccurate and misleading information as ‘research’ while, at the same time, seeking significant money from our company.” Bank of America made these criticisms of the NFHA’s methodology: HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan said the agency is considering several discrimination complaints, including the one against Bank of America. He said the agency has to determine the nature of the complaint, and if it finds substantial evidence supporting the case, it can refer the case to the Justice Department. “We look at these complaints very seriously,” he said. The agency recently made a “no cause” determination in a complaint against U.S. Bank, but HUD is still considering some of the issues NFHA raised about the HUD decision. HUD also reached agreements with Wells Fargo three years ago on similar complaints. NFHA says its investigation found that across the country, foreclosed homes in white neighborhoods had significantly fewer problems. Homes in minority communities were twice as likely to have broken, boarded-up or unsecured windows, and they were more than twice as likely to have trash or debris on the property. In Prince George’s, the nation’s highest-income majority-black county, nearly two-thirds of the foreclosed homes in minority neighborhoods had “substantial amounts of trash” on the premises; more than half of the homes had overgrown grass or accumulated leaves; and one-third of the homes had unsecured or broken doors. None of the homes in white neighborhoods had those problems, according to the complaint. A NFHA photo of a home in District Heights shows weeds and vines growing over the front of the property and the steps of the house covered with grass and weeds. A photo of a home in Temple Hills shows standing water and trash in the yard, which advocates say creates a breeding ground for mosquitoes and a health hazard for the neighborhood. Bushnell, who lives in a working-class community of 340 townhouses, said some improvements had been made to the foreclosed home next door, including the replacement of broken windows, but nothing has happened since then. “I feel like it is not a priority for them,” she said. A spike in foreclosed homes has been a threat to community development efforts in Prince George’s since the housing crisis. According to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, in the second quarter of 2016, there were 2,182 foreclosure events in Prince George’s; that number includes notices of default, notices of sale and lender purchases. The county has the highest foreclosure rate in the Washington region. The NFHA action Wednesday was an amendment to an original complaint, after investigating an additional 399 Bank of America foreclosures. “Bank of America’s deliberate neglect of its foreclosures in communities of color creates financial concerns as well as health and safety risks for people living near poorly‐maintained foreclosed homes,” Smith said. “Too many of these foreclosures have overgrown weeds, unsecured doors or windows, and debris left in the yard, creating perfect breeding grounds for rats, mice, snakes, and mosquitoes.”

Former Riggs Bank headquarters near White House goes up for sale

Riggs Bank was a 168-year-old institution and one of Washington’s most well-known companies when it was acquired in 2005, in no small part because of its headquarters building across the street from the Treasury Department, a few hundred feet from the White House grounds. After the sale, new owner PNC Bank replaced the Riggs name out front and turned it into a bank branch. Now the stately building at 1503-1505 Pennsylvania Ave. NW will enter a new chapter because PNC has put it up for sale. PNC officials say the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets because of security concerns rendered the branch there unworkable. The branch has been closed since 2010, although an ATM still operates out front and the bank still hosts special events there occasionally. PNC, a unit of Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group, plans to close a branch on Massachusetts Avenue in Dupont Circle as well. “When Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to through traffic, the Corcoran branch lost its viability for PNC as a retail bank location,” said Michael N. Harreld, regional president of PNC Bank, in a statement. “We are committed to finding a new owner for the signature branch of ‘the Bank of the Presidents’ who will honor the historical significance of the building and be able to use the location in a different way.” Riggs was easily the largest Washington bank in the late 1800s when its officers began laying the groundwork for a new headquarters near the Treasury Department. Designed by New York architects York and Sawyer and completed in 1902, the five-story building is about as close as one can get to the grounds of the White House, and bank officials have long hosted presidential inaugural parade viewing parties there. The Ionic columns on its south facade resemble those at Treasury. In 1922, Riggs added a western annex, and in 1986, it restored some of the building’s features to better match its original design, according to PNC. The building has about 42,000 square feet of gross building area, but much of that can’t really be used for office space, thanks to design features such as a five-story, 60-foot atrium with interior balconies and a skylight. The D.C. government assessed it at $17.7 million this year. Founded by William W. Corcoran in 1836, Riggs was run by Joe L. Allbritton for more 20 years and later by his son, Robert, now chairman and chief executive of Allbritton Communications, until its purchase by PNC. Before being acquired, Riggs weathered a series of scandals related to its banking businesses for international embassies, governments and political leaders. In 2004, the federal government fined the bank $25 million for money laundering. Whoever buys the building won’t have an easy path to make broad changes to it, as it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Changes to the exterior would require approval by the District’s Historic Preservation Review Board and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Rebecca Miller, executive director of the nonprofit D.C. Preservation League, said she and the organization’s board will also consider trying to protect some of the building’s banking features inside. “We would be looking at whether the interior should be protected,” she said.

Wells Fargo tops list of Washington area banks in terms of local deposits

Consumers and businesses in the Washington area are saving more money as economic uncertainty continues to loom over the region. Deposits at eight of the Washington area’s 10 largest banks rose in the past year, according to data released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “All this shutdown talk — and of course the actual shutdown now — may have incentivized people, particularly government employees and contractors, to be a little bit more cautious and have more cash on hand,” said Bert Ely, principal of Ely & Co., a financial consulting firm in Alexandria. Excluding Capital One’s McLean headquarters branch, which holds large corporate accounts that do not necessarily reflect the local market, deposits at area banks grew 3.29 percent to $147.69 billion as of June 30. That growth is roughly in line with national deposits, which rose 5.43 percent to a total of $9.43 trillion. Wells Fargo, which had $23.77 billion in deposits as of June 30, reclaimed its lead from McLean-based Capital One to become the largest bank in the region. Wells Fargo, which is based in San Francisco, held 12.63 percent of the area’s deposits. The bank, which has 160 local branches, said its 2011 purchase of Wachovia helped solidify its presence in the Washington area. “We have certainly seen a growth in our existing customers’ deposits,” said Michael L. Golden, Wells Fargo’s regional president for the Washington area. “Our customers are keeping more deposits with us, and we have reaped the benefits of [Wachovia’s] broad network.” The bank has expanded its local presence in recent years with the opening of a new concept store in Washington’s NoMa neighborhood that relies on wireless devices and large touch-screen ATMs and is virtually paperless. There have also been efforts to hire more employees and beef up services for businesses in the area. Capital One experienced a 23 percent drop in Washington area deposits to $22.13 billion and slid to No. 2. The company, which has 194 local branches, said the slump was attributable more to national corporate activity managed by its headquarters than to local market forces. Bank of America (which had $21.4 billion in deposits), SunTrust Bank ($16.66 billion) and BB&T ($13.26 billion) all remained strongholds in the region as deposits continued to climb. At Eagle Bank — the 10th largest bank in the area and the biggest community bank — deposits rose 15.41 percent to $2.9 billion. Demand for loans is also on the rise, said chief executive Ronald D. Paul. “It’s been very steady deposit growth,” Paul said. “As we’ve gotten larger, the ability of us to attract larger customers has helped us grow with deposits.” **** Even so, Wells Fargo’s Golden cautions against painting a sweeping picture of the economy based on a snapshot of June 30 deposits. “As I know with my own checking account, that balance fluctuates pretty dramatically from day to day, and it’s the same for a bank,” he said. “We’re in the business of having money flow in and out.” The number of branches in the area continued to fall as banks consolidated offices. There were 1,750 bank branches in the area on June 30, 28 fewer than last year. The FDIC considers metropolitan Washington to include the District, its Maryland and Virginia suburbs and Jefferson County in West Virginia.

Did you know the World Bank has a pretty cool bookstore? Well, it’s closing.

Did you know that the World Bank runs a nifty bookstore at 18th and Pennsylvania NW, stocking everything from statistics-heavy tomes on international development to “Cooking the Cambodian Way,” from “Natural Disaster Hotspots: Case Studies” to **Michael Lewis’s** “The Big Short”? How lovely, in this age of disappearing downtown bookstores — bye-bye Borders, so long Chapters, adios Olsson’s — that we have this brainy oasis for lovers of the printed word. But not for much longer. The World Bank Group InfoShop — the store’s official name — will close Oct. 14. Fans are distraught. More than 1,300 have signed an online petition begging the bank’s bigwigs to keep the shop open. “I still love books, real books,” said **Aldo Morri** , an international business consultant who often does work for the bank and is one of the people behind the petition. “I like to put my fingers on them and flip through them.” Page-flipping is being replaced by mouse-clicking. Over the past six years, the World Bank has increasingly made its publications available free online, meaning a bookstore isn’t central to its mission. It posts not only the finished reports but also the raw data and research that went into producing them. “We want people around the world to have access to our knowledge, and we opened our bookstore at a time before the Internet had spread globally,” bank spokesman **David Theis** wrote in an email. He added: “We aren’t about selling books in Washington — we want to spread knowledge in Burkina Faso.” Not everyone accepts the argument that the world’s knowledge is just a few easy mouse clicks away. “That is so untrue,” said **Mike Goldberg** , a microfinance expert who has worked at the bank for 22 years. “Anything junky might be a few mouse clicks away. But anything of high quality that’s technically up to date, it’s much harder to find that in the jungle of the Web now. If you go to the InfoShop, it’s fairly selective. You know you’re getting the latest, the best, the well thought-out.” There’s a sense of careful curation to the InfoShop. You may not find **Stephen King** , but you will find someone even scarier: **Thomas Piketty**. Plus, you can get tiny desk flags from different nations ( $5, including base) and   T-shirts that say, “End Poverty.” On a recent afternoon I encountered **Eric Lewis** perusing the offerings. “It’s a great place to come in and browse,” said Eric, who likes the foreign fiction as well as nonfiction books about the Middle East, a region he visits for his job as an international lawyer. Other typical customers include World Bank employees; staffers from the State Department, the White House and the U.S. Treasury; and students and professors from nearby George Washington University. The occasional tourist wanders in, too. “They come in because I put the cheap books up front,” said **Guy Brussat** , the store’s book buyer, one of two full-time employees. (There are also three part-timers.) “I’ll say one thing: They never censored me,” Guy said of the bank’s management. He still remembers the time a rather countercultural fellow stormed in and accused the store of being a mouthpiece for the bank. Guy took him to a shelf and pointed out a book called “10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF and the World Bank.” It’s unclear what will become of the space after the store closes in October. Some World Bank employees told me that they heard it would be used for offices, allowing the bank to move staff out of rented buildings. The Washington City Paper reported it will be used for events. David said no final decision has been made. The bookstore’s fans hope the petition might move the bank’s management to reconsider. That seems unlikely. David wrote in an email: “We understand that people have an emotional connection to this bookstore, as they did to the Borders that closed several years ago on L Street and the countless other shops around the country and around the world. But our mission is not on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 18th Street. It is in the health clinics and schools and rural villages in the poorest corners of the world.” True enough. And yet, won’t something be lost, some only-in-Washington wonkery, or perhaps the possibility that a book bought in the InfoShop might end up changing policy in some faraway land? Guy recalls how during one of the bank’s annual meetings, the oil minister from an African country came in wearing colorful national dress. Trailed by his security entourage, he swept through the store, pointing out books: _this_ one, _that_ one. In the end it was more than 100 titles. At the cash register, one of his underlings pulled a fist-size roll of $100 bills from his pocket and peeled off several thousand dollars. That anecdote may illustrate the excesses of African oil ministers more than it does some patrons’ affection for the World Bank InfoShop, but what a great anecdote — and not the sort of thing you’re likely to witness at Barnes & Noble on Rockville Pike. **Twitter: @johnkelly** For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.

Extending FDIC program could help community banks invest more locally

In Washington and elsewhere in the country, small and mid-size businesses are the job creators and the engine of economic recovery. And, here and elsewhere, loans from community banks are the fuel for small-business growth. Last year, community banks made nearly two-thirds of all loans under $1 million to small businesses. But community banks need deposits in order to make loans. And one major source of deposits — municipal, county and state governments — have historically entrusted their monies almost exclusively to super-regional and national banks. These money center banks don’t necessarily lend back to the very markets from which they receive government funds, returning no benefit to the communities from which they receive deposits. State and local governments should increase their levels of deposits with local community banks. What’s the payback? EagleBank, the local community bank of which I am CEO, will commit to turn a dollar of such deposits into two dollars of loans in the same jurisdiction. It’s a win-win. I also urge extension of the FDIC’s Transaction Account Guarantee or “TAG” program, which extends unlimited FDIC protection to noninterest-bearing checking accounts. Without this program, noninterest bearing accounts are only insured up to $250,000, and as a result small and medium-size businesses that have larger deposits may be more inclined to place their money in larger banks under the theory that government regulators view those banks as too big to fail. The TAG program puts deposits in local community banks on an equal playing field. The FDIC insurance premiums are fully funded by banks without taxpayer assistance. But TAG is set to sunset in December. It is critical for Congress to extend TAG. Without deposits, community banks can’t make loans. Last year, EagleBank, for example, increased its loans by 24 percent because we had the increased deposits to deploy. Thus, one local bank empowered hundreds of new local jobs and provided funding and hope to numerous local entrepreneurs and business strivers. Local deposits lead to local loans that will lead to local economic development and vitality. A few years ago, two sisters seeking to grow their start-up bakery came to us. EagleBank, not a megabank, saw the potential and made the loan. Today, Georgetown Cupcake is nationally known. Community bank loans by EagleBank have fostered economic development in underserved Shaw with the United Negro College Fund headquarters and along 14th Street with the funding of Whitman-Walker Clinic, the important community health facility. A community bank is the lender for the restoration of the newly reopened Howard Theatre. Community banks are also the sponsors of innumerable local philanthropies, supporting community health, education and cultural efforts. With local deposits into local banks turning into new businesses, new start-ups and more jobs, Washingtonians should always think “local.” Shop local. Dine local. Bank local. Community banks can help launch businesses; it is local customers who will help them thrive. Local deposits are facilitating local loans. You just don’t get that nexus when you make a deposit into a national bank. Ronald D. Paul is chairman and chief executive of EagleBank.

Wells Fargo’s new branch in NoMa focuses on wireless, paperless transactions

The bank of the future, according to Wells Fargo, relies on wireless devices, large touch-screen ATMs and is virtually paperless. At the company’s newest branch, which opened last week in the Northeast Washington neighborhood of NoMa, employees use tablets and smartphones to assist clients, and customers can have receipts e-mailed or text messaged to their phones. The location is the first of its kind. At about 1,000-square-feet, it is one-third the size of a typical branch. “It’s a very efficient use of space for us,” said Jonathan G. Velline, executive vice president for ATM banking and store strategy at Wells Fargo. “In a 3,000 square-foot store, we would have an area for full-service banking, and a separate area for self-service banking. Here we fit it all in once place. We started layering it all on top of each other, so this is our full-service, self-service and [one-on-one] banking space all in one.” Employees — there are currently three — have no assigned desks or workspaces. Instead, they use pop-out work stations to assist customers. Most basic needs — withdrawing money or depositing checks, for example — can be done using the store’s three ATMs, Golden said. When a client needs help opening a bank account or applying for a mortgage, employees lead them to mini work areas equipped with computers and cushioned benches. (When not in use, keyboards are stashed in drawers and monitors swivel toward the wall.) “This [new design] is driven by the marketplace,” said Michael L. Golden, Wells Fargo’s regional president for the Washington area ****. “We couldn’t have been here without this format — there just aren’t thousands of square foot of space available in many neighborhoods.” Traditional branches typically require up to 40 percent of the space to be designated for back offices, Velline said. At night, bright yellow doors close off a portion of the branch to create a 24-hour ATM vestibule. In addition to standard $20 bills, the machines also dispense $1, $5 and $100 bills. The branch’s revamped design reflects broader changes in peoples’ banking habits, executive say. The majority of customers tend to favor wireless and mobile banking — at least most of the time. “But every four or six months, they might want personalized help with some issue,” Golden said. “We are prepared to fulfill every need.” Nazmul Haque, who works in NoMa, stopped by the new location early last week. He said he had closed his Wells Fargo bank account several years earlier, but decided to reactivate it when he saw the new branch in the first floor of the office building where he works. “I went in and it literally took five minutes [to reactivate my account],” Haque said. “It was very environmentally friendly — everything was electronic so I didn’t need to sign any hard copies. I’d never seen such a small location that had everything in it.” Even so, there are certain instances when employees might need to refer customers to one of three larger branches nearby. “If you’re a merchant and you have heavy needs in terms of cash and coins, we’re really not set up for that here,” Velline said. “We’re using this as an opportunity to learn what this format can deliver.” San Francisco-based Wells Fargo began working on the new design about 18 months ago, Velline said. In October, the bank built a prototype in a store basement in New York. “It was mostly dry wall and two-by-fours, but it allowed us to visualize exactly how things would come together,” Velline said. “How does this feel from the [employee]’s perspective, how does it feel from the customer’s perspective? How does it all fit together?” They tested different types of furniture and rearranged work spaces to make sure it was easy for customers to move from one area to the next. Velline said the company was not sure how many more of these new branches Wells Fargo would open, but said that they would be well-suited to urban markets where real estate can be expensive and difficult to come by. With $21.76 billion in local deposits — roughly 14 percent of the market share — Wells Fargo is the second-largest bank in the Washington area, behind Capital One. But Golden says there is still room to expand. “Clearly we have a sizeable market here,” he said. “But we also have an opportunity to grow.”

The country’s last black-owned banks are in a fight for their survival

Capital Savings Bank opened shop in Washington in 1888, making it the nation's first black-owned bank at a time when the mere notion of offering financial services to the African American community was a novel idea. Now black-run banks are in a fight for survival, even though many advocates argue that many African Americans remain starved for banking services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. counted 25 black-owned banks remaining in the country last year, down from 48 in 2001. That decrease came even as the overall number of minority-owned banks increased slightly, going from 164 to 174. In addition, the majority of black-owned banks that remain open are on shaky ground and struggling to hold on in the face of the economic devastation that has ravaged many of their customers. Analysts say 60 percent of black-run banks lost money in 2013. "I would venture to say that [the vast majority of black banks] are in varying degrees of trouble," said Darrell Jackson, chief executive and president of Chicago's Seaway Bank, a black-owned bank celebrating its 50th anniversary. Black-run banks have been struggling for years, as mainstream institutions increasingly picked off their best-heeled customers. The increased competition came amid what some call a string of strategic blunders.The banks, historically headquartered in the heart of traditional black communities such as Chicago's South Side, New York's Harlem and Washington, D.C.'s Shaw, failed to modernize their services. Few offered the branch networks, computerized banking and other automated services that have come to dominate the business. And many of the banks failed to follow the African American middle class to the suburbs. Taken together, black banks control just $5 billion in assets, a tiny fraction of the size of the nation's banking behemoths, such as Wells Fargo, which by itself has some $1.7 trillion in assets. Black banks tend to be small even by the standard of minority owned banks, which as a group had some $181 billion in assets at the end of 2013, according a FDIC report.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The economic shock continues to ripple through the black community, upending black business and even churches, which historically have been the best customers for black banks. Meanwhile, many black-owned banks are left with a lot of toxic loans in their portfolios. "This is such an extremely important sector of the banking community," said Michael A. Grant, president of the National Bankers Association, the lobbying group for black banks. "We were hit so hard during this sub-prime crisis, and they are having a hard time working their way back from that." Others argue that many black-run banks planted the seeds for their own demise by failing to evolve with the times. William Michael Cunningham, an economist and entrepreneur, said many black banks do not do enough to modernize their businesses, and instead rely too heavily on political connections and old business alliances for deposits and customers. "Being a black banker in a top-30 city in the U.S. is a very good job, mainly because you don't have to do much," Cunningham said. "Too often, if you are a black banker, your incentive is not to make loans." Paul O'Connor, founder of Angkor Strategic Advisors, a Chicago-based banking consultancy, called black-run banks a victim of the larger progress of African Americans. Like other institutions that thrived in the face of rampant discrimination, black banks now confront more and better financed competition for relatively affluent customers. Meanwhile, few banks see profits in banking the poor. At the same time, he noted, many black communities — particularly impoverished neighborhoods in which black-owned banks tend to be headquartered — remain in dire need of better banking options. "The positive side of this is that the African American community has developed in a way that they don't need African American banks like they did 50 or 70 years ago," he said. "Also, they have a margin for error that is much smaller than most banks. At the end of the day, you are banking human beings and they are as good a credit risk as the last job they had. A lot of people these institutions banked are hurt economically." Whatever the root cause of the problems of  the problems of black banks, many analysts agree their demise  is a net loss, since they  disproportionately serve  poor communities where  banks are few, according to the FDIC."Often, black banks are the only bank, ore one of two, in the entire zip code," said Russell Kashian, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. "If they weren't there, there would be nothing." Given that reality, many advocates say their survival should be a priority of both the government and the black community. Black bankers have been lobbying federal officials to relax regulations in a way that would make it less costly to do business. Others say there need to be better incentives and training and mentoring to help sustain the banks. "If we want these underserved neighborhoods served, either we have to make these communities wealthier, or provide some better incentives for these banks to exist," Kashian said. The National Bankers Association's Grant added that more black consumers should make a priority of banking with institutions that served their communities when others would not. "The African American community itself is going to have to do more to support its businesses, which includes the banks," Grant said. "Why are we boycotting our own businesses? These are the banks that were there for us before integration. We should be there for them now."

Unsuccessful bank robbery is latest in a string of holdups in past nine days

A man who tried to rob a bank in the District on Friday was turned away empty-handed in one of the latest of the eight holdups or attempted robberies at financial institutions in the Washington area in the past nine days. The incident Friday occurred at a Citibank in the 3200 block of 14th Street NW, a stone’s throw from the Columbia Heights Metro station, in a vibrant, bustling section of the city. According to police, the would-be robber entered the branch about 2:40 p.m. and presented a note to a teller. In contrast to most such incidents, the teller refused to hand over any money, the police said. They said the would-be robber left and is being sought. A second bank incident occurred Friday in Herndon at a Wells Fargo branch at Elden Street and Alabama Drive, according to police in the Northern Virginia town. A helicopter was used in the search for the robber. Of the string of recent incidents, the most dramatic occurred Dec. 21 in Laurel, Md., in which the robber was described as wearing a beard similar to Santa Claus or someone from the “Duck Dynasty” cable TV show. The robber fired at least one shot into the ceiling of the PNC bank branch on Main Street before getting cash from tellers and fleeing in a vehicle, said Laurel police spokesman Pete Piringer. No injuries were reported. Three other recent robberies occurred in Fairfax County. One came in Howard County and the other in the Potomac section of Montgomery County. The first of the three Fairfax robberies occurred Dec. 20 in the Hayfield area, in which two men with handguns took money from a BB&T branch on Telegraph Road after ordering employees to lie on the ground. The other Fairfax robberies occurred Dec. 21 in the Franconia area and Dec. 23 in the Mount Vernon area, county police said. They said the two may be linked.

Even the Better Business Bureau has disowned Wells Fargo

For more than 100 years, Wells Fargo has been ubiquitous in San Francisco. The City by the Bay is the bank’s hometown and Wells Fargo is one of its largest employers. There is even a museum in the city dedicated to the stagecoach Wells Fargo once used to cross the Western Plains. Next week, San Francisco officials are scheduled to vote on whether to cut off business with Wells Fargo, in perhaps one of the most personal rebukes the bank has faced since acknowledging that it fired 5,300 employees for setting up unauthorized accounts customers didn’t want to meet aggressive sales goals. “It’s disheartening to see our hometown bank was engaged in this sort of reckless behavior,” said John Avalos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors.  The bank also lost its Better Business Bureau accreditation. The 100-year old organization cited the sales scandal among the reasons for pulling its seal of approval from Wells Fargo after more than 35 years. But the bureau has also has received more than 4,000 complaints about the bank over the last three years and of 107 customer reviews it has received, all but four were negative. “It means they no longer meet the standards of trust,” said Jarrod Wise, a spokesman for the Better Business Bureau in the San Francisco Bay area. “They no longer qualify for accreditation.” It is just the last embarrassing episode for Wells Fargo. More than a month after it agreed to an $185 million fine and acknowledged that for at least five years thousands of employees set up sham accounts customers didn’t want, sometimes by moving money from an authorized account, Wells Fargo is still struggling to contain the damage. Its’ long-time CEO, John G. Stumpf, has retired and the company says it is spending millions to improve its internal compliance process. A slump in its stock price has pushed Wells Fargo from its perch as the world’s largest bank by market value. (Earlier this week, Stumpf also resigned from the boards of Target and Chevron. He had already resigned from an advisory role with the Federal Reserve.) “Our No. 1 priority is making things right with our customers and restoring public trust, and we are dedicated to ensuring that all aspects of the company’s business are conducted with integrity, transparency, and oversight,” the bank said in a statement. “We have already taken important steps, and will continue to do so, to ensure that the sales culture in our retail banking business is 100 percent aligned with our customers’ interests, including ending product sales goals for everyone in the retail banking business to make certain nothing gets in the way of doing what’s right for customers.” But that process is being hamstrung by the nature of the scheme, a scandal that touched customers directly, industry officials say. “The relatability of this scandal will extend” its life, said Isaac Boltansky of Compass Point Research & Trading. “Ultimately, the public will move on … but Wells Fargo will be in the public relations penalty box for the foreseeable future.” And it likely to get worse as lawmakers and regulators continue to investigate the case. “The byzantine regulatory infrastructure we have has allowed this death by a thousand cuts to occur,” said Edward Mills, financial policy analyst with FBR Capital Markets. “If this was pre-financial crisis, it would have received little attention.” The House Financial Services Committee is conducting its own inquiry into the case and federal prosecutors are considering potential civil or criminal charges. On Thursday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) sent a letter to the bank questioning whether its former CEO, Stumpf, will be forced to give up more of his compensation. “If Mr. Stumpf is allowed to walk away with tens of millions of dollars in compensation that he received while bank employees were engaging in widespread fraudulent activity, then he has profited from the bank’s fraud,” the letter said.

Burglar breaks into Woodley Park bank through hole in the wall, according to police

Bank robbers typically walk in through the front door, armed with guns or holding stickup notes. But early Friday, a burglar tried another way into a Woodley Park bank: by breaking a hole in the wall. Well before dawn, using a shuttered cafe and deli as cover, the person broke through the wall between the place where sandwiches were once kept and where money is still kept, District police said. Surveillance cameras, which authorities said may have caught the intrusion at the Bank of America branch in the 2600 block of Connecticut Ave.,NW, put the break-in at 2:30 a.m. An employee arriving at work found the hole at 8:15 a.m., police said. Officer Araz Alali, a D.C. police spokesman, said the burglar got into the bank and tried to break into an automatic teller machine. The officer said the attempt failed, and the burglar left without getting anything. Police and FBI agents spent hours Friday at the scene of what Alali called a “large hole in the wall.” Authorities would not say how they believe it was made or whether any evidence was recovered, but the hole appeared to have been cut. Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, called a burglary at a bank unusual. “You don’t really hear of them too often these days,” she said. There have been six bank holdups in the District in 2012, but only one burglary — Friday’s — according to the FBI. Bank robberies in the District have been going down lately, from 36 in 2010 to 16 last year. Bank of America spokesman T.J. Crawford declined comment. He did confirm that the hole forced the branch, across the street from the Woodley Park Metro station, to close for the day. That was confirmed by a visit to the branch, where police were turning customers away. Half a dozen FBI agents were busy collecting evidence Friday afternoon, wearing bright blue latex gloves as they inspected a two-foot rectangular hole between the bank and what had been Cafe International. Signs plastered on the cafe’s window read “Retail space for lease.”

Neighborhood Watch in D.C.: Vigilance, not vigilantes

When I was growing up in the District in the 1950s, the “neighborhood watch” on my block was Frieda, who lived across the street. She had a pair of binoculars set up in the front window, and she reported to parents when their children misbehaved. I never had a key to my house — because the door was never locked. Children ran from one home to the next and entered as if they lived there. The parents watched all of the kids as if they were their own. We used a telephone tree to spread word of any news of interest to all. We knew our neighbors and looked out for them. We are not in the 1950s anymore, and we can’t responsibly leave our doors unlocked. Most parents aren’t home during the day to watch their children, let alone their neighbors’. Neighborhood watch necessarily takes another form. Today, neighborhood watch in the District is, first and foremost, an information-dissemination program. Most of the crime in the city is preventable “crime of opportunity.” If you leave your laptop on the seat of your car, it might be stolen. If you walk away from your purse in a grocery cart, heading back down the aisle for bananas, it might be stolen. If you walk the street wearing earbuds and reading your e-mail on an iPhone, instead of watching your surroundings, you could be a robbery victim. If you leave your doors unlocked, you could be a burglary victim. By learning about the behaviors that contribute to such crimes of opportunity, you can learn how not to become a victim of crime, and you can help to reduce the city’s crime rate. Frieda still has her role to play, too: By getting to know our neighbors and helping to connect them to each other, so that neighbors know and care about neighbors, neighborhood watch participants help the police. Connected neighborhoods are more likely to notice suspicious activity and report it to 911. The police cannot be everywhere. We can help them by acting as their eyes and ears and alerting them to crime. But that does not mean that we act for them. On the contrary, we simply “see it and say it,” as the expression goes. We are not a vigilante group armed and eager for action. We do not put ourselves in harm’s way or, other than dialing 911, take action on our own. This distinguishes the neighborhood watch program in the District from the reported conduct of Sanford, Fla., neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. The facts in that case are still not clear, but his alleged actions contrast with the initiatives we are undertaking with the police in the District in several important ways. First, our block-captain training emphasizes guidelines for identifying potential criminal conduct without resorting to stereotypes or a reliance on biases. Second, we do not encourage or rely on armed defense as protection against crime but instead focus on eliminating the conditions that invite crime. Third, we rely on the police — the law enforcement professionals — to make any judgments about the need for further action. We promote neighborhood-wide vigilance, not vigilantes. We are all safer that way. We won’t be leaving our doors open, but we hope for a city that can feel like the 1950s again, with neighbors looking out for neighbors without resorting to violent self-help. The writer is a volunteer neighborhood watch trainer in the District. **More from Local Opinions:** Joshua Wyner: John Payton’s life of principle Janet D. Howell: Responsible gun laws in Virginia?

A changing neighborhood’s last cheap carryout is closing. Owner says, ‘Change is great.’

For a man who is about to lose his business to the unstoppable forces of neighborhood gentrification, Jose Luis Guzman is remarkably upbeat. “I’m excited about the future — my future and the city’s future,” Guzman said. “It’s changing for the better, which is good. Change is great.”  He stuck it out through tough times, such as the closing of the Hecht’s warehouse next door. His regulars — neighbors, police officers, bus drivers, Metro employees — kept coming to the lime-green corner restaurant with high booths for his egg sandwiches and friendly banter. When the neighborhood got rough, he was robbed “so many times.” “One time, they got me when I was locking the gate, and they actually hit me in the face and knocked me out,” Guzman said. He stayed open.  But not for him. On Wednesday, Nov. 23, Guzman will close the restaurant’s doors for the final time, but not before giving away free food to all of his neighbors, which include a homeless shelter next door. His landlords are doubling his rent, he says, after he made an offer to buy the building that was declined. (Several attempts to reach the building’s owners for comment were unsuccessful; no one at their number picked up.) “We kept this neighborhood alive for so many years. It was one of the worst neighborhoods in the city,” Guzman said. “But now that the good times are coming, I think it’s kind of a sad note that [I’m] going to have to leave. But that’s part of the change. I don’t blame the city for that. That’s business.”  Though he tried to cater to the area’s new residents by changing his menu — and had planned to renovate — they didn’t come to Louis’ very much, Guzman said. “They go out in an Uber,” he said.  “Talking to some of the young people living in Ivy City, they say, ‘The other places in Ivy City aren’t for us,’ ” meaning the new places. “I don’t think those places have any negative intentions, but they’re more expensive,” he said. The hardest part, Guzman says, is saying goodbye to his regulars. One of those is Melinda Washington, an instructor for Amtrak. “He was always pleasant, the food was good, and he did a lot of community work for people,” especially the people in the shelter next door, she said. “He took care of everybody.” But Guzman remains upbeat. “I feel like I was part of the city, I feel like I was part of the neighborhood. It’s a beautiful experience,” he said. Besides, “if I made it in Ivy City, I know I can make it anywhere else.” So he’s going to take a little break and then make a fresh start. Maybe he’ll open another restaurant in Ivy City eventually, but for now, his plan is to learn the trade that cost him his business. “Hopefully,” he said, “I’ll go into real estate.”

Trump pledges to ease regulations of community banks

President Trump met with nearly a dozen community bankers on Thursday, pledging to ease regulations the industry says has stifled its growth. Community banks “play a vital role in helping create jobs by providing approximately half  of all loans to small businesses. … [We want to] preserve our community banks,” Trump said during the meeting at the White House. The meeting — dubbed a “listening session” — was also attended by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, head of the National Economics Council, as well as executives from small banks across the country, including Texas and Vermont. “You'll be able to loan. You'll be able to be safe. You'll be able to provide the jobs that we want and also create great businesses,” Trump told the bankers. Trump's statements echo his repeated pledges to dismantle financial- crisis-era legislation, the Dodd-Frank Act. The law was designed primarily to rein in large Wall Street firms, but small and medium-size community banks say they have been crushed under its new regulatory burdens. “One-size-fits-all regulations are imposing unnecessary burdens on community banks that stifle lending and growth in local communities,” said Rebeca Romero Rainey, chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America. Community banks, they say, shouldn’t face the same sort of rules as megabanks such as Goldman Sachs or Bank of America. The smaller banks, for example, want to raise the $50 billion asset threshold at which banks face tougher oversight. And they are fighting proposed rules that would require banks to comply with the same reporting requirements when making a small-business loan as they do with a mortgage. That extra paperwork, and the threat of facing prosecution or a fine if it is not filed correctly, industry officials say, could scare some banks away from making small-business loans. “It was really clear, he is a businessman, he understands the relationships between lenders and borrowers,” said Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America. “He really drilled down and was very knowledgeable about several of the regulations the bankers brought up. He could empathize with them.” “The whole tone of the meeting was we want to help the community banks on main street,” he said.  Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is preparing to unveil new legislation, as soon as this month, that would strip out significant parts of Dodd-Frank. Trump has ordered Mnuchin to issue a report by June recommending ways to ease banking industry rules. It is part of a larger Trump administration effort to roll back regulatory burdens across several industries, including the energy sector. But Trump's bid to ease the burden on Wall Street is likely to face stiff resistance from Democrats and advocacy groups who say banks need more restrictions, not less, to ensure there is not a repeat of the financial crisis that required big taxpayer bailouts nearly a decade ago. And despite the industry complaints, banking profits have reached record levels, they say.  This type of data shows, advocates say, that regulations are not holding back the industry. Still, bankers may have a long wait before lawmakers dive into the potentially contentious task of passing legislation that strikes at Dodd Frank. Other priorities – health care reform and a revamp of the corporate tax code – are all expected to be completed first. Instead, industry officials have already turned their attention toward the myriad of financial regulators, from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Office of Comptroller of the Currency. Trump is expected to nominate new leadership for many of these agencies, which could weaken rules already in place without new legislation.

Occupy Wall Street plans to ‘take down’ Bank of America

Occupy Wall Street protesters say they plan to “take down” Bank of America on Friday by encouraging people to remove their money from the bank. The “Move Your Money Relay” will include escorting people out of Bank of America branches to help them move their funds to community banks and local credit unions. Members of the Occupy movement, who have long resisted making specific demands or adopting a leader, say they think that in the case of Bank of America, more specific action is needed. “We want to make sure that people feel like that is a direct action unto itself,” Occupy activist Nelini Stamp told Alternet, a progressive news site. “It’s not just ‘I’m just moving my money from here,’ but actually people are feeling empowered and knowledgeable about the choices that they’re making when they’re making their banking decisions.” Bank of America did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the protest. A recent article by Rolling Stone writer — and Occupy Wall Street supporter — Matt Taibbi compared Bank of America to the “world’s worst behaved teenager. “They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents,” Taibbi wrote. Occupy protesters often employ the lessons and jargon of Taibbi, including his famous description of Goldman Sachs as “vampire squids.” One offshoot of Occupy has already been taking on Bank of America for months, “living-rooming” local branches of Bank of America, meaning its members move furniture into the banks and explain to employees they are moving in because the bank took their homes. Bank of America last month tried to stem the foreclosure problem by sending proposals to more than 1,000 of its customers asking that they become renters to avoid foreclosure. In February, The Washington Post’s Suzy Khimm wrote that Occupy’s protests could be having a real impact on banks. Khimm cited a new study from J.D. Power and Associates that found a growing number of Americans are transferring their money out of large and mid-sized banks: 9.6 percent moved their money in 2011, up from 8.7 percent the year before, and 7.7 percent two years ago. The most popular reason people moved their money was because of higher fees, such as Bank of America’s proposal for a $5-a-month debit card fee, which the bank later scrapped. But in a separate survey from Javelin Strategy & Research, 11 percent of people who switched banks cited a grass-roots campaign urging them to switch to smaller banks or credit unions as the reason for their move. Is Occupy Wall Street hurting banks? Khimm wrote: “At least on the margins.”

Manassas’s 9300 Prescott Ave. home sees likely resolution to weary story

For the better part of 20 years, the stately home at 9300 Prescott Ave. in Manassas has been in disrepair, a symbol to many of the town’s neglected history. Much debate produced little action to save the sagging structure, which had been scheduled for demolition last week. But on Saturday, Hugh Ickrath, a neighbor from two doors down, led a group of 15 curious townspeople for a look inside the musty premises, revealing that he and two other investors had managed to purchase 9300 Prescott for $118,750 at a short sale held before the bulldozer arrived. “It’s Christmas,” said neighbor Harriet Carter before she and others entered the home, wondering what they would find. Carter has looked at the decaying house almost since 1985, when she moved in across the street. The Queen Anne-style home had waited and waned since then, deteriorating almost beyond recognition.The home’s wide, Southern porch had visibly weakened to a point at which the town had strung yellow hazard tape from pillar to pillar. Plywood covered its windows on the first floor, its pointed roof warped, and flaking white paint all around the aged Victorian revealed weathered wood. Neighbors implored the city to step in and save a civic treasure; conservatives, led by the local tea party, implored them not to. The debate dragged on for years, as longtime owner Dorothy Feaganes received exasperated pleas from the city to maintain the property. Eventually, officials said that demolition was their only option. But Ickrath, 48, the neighbor who’d fought longest and hardest to save the home, refused to buckle. He had spent years trying to wrest control of the home from various banks that held the mortgage. At one point, he left a phone message for Bank of America’s chief executive, imploring him to foreclose on 9300 Prescott so it could be sold. An assistant called back, but the bank declined to act. Indeed, as much of Prince William County was hit by a dramatic wave of foreclosures, 9300 Prescott somehow stood above the fray — and beyond the reach of bankers. As the end approached in recent weeks, Ickrath consulted a lawyer and asked what charges he might face if he stood in the bulldozer’s path. Finally, he negotiated the short sale, purchasing the property for less than was owed on the mortgage with the blessing of owner Dorothy Feaganes’s daughter, Terry. Larry Linton, a fellow Prescott Avenue neighbor and old-house lover who owns five other historic homes, went in with Ickrath, as did Ickrath’s father-in-law, George Dowd. They say they are committed to seeing the restoration through. “Emotional,” Ickrath said Saturday, summing up his feelings after finally taking possession of the property. Losing a piece of the city, a piece of American history, would have been unbearable, Ickrath said. “We would have had to look at that gaping hole,” he said. Likely constructed in 1906, the year after a fire decimated the town, 9300 Prescott sits at the entrance to Manassas’s historic district. Over the years, the back and forth between the city, the courts, the neighbors and Feaganes has become the stuff of legend, captivating preservationists on one side and conservatives on the other, who thought using public funds to fix up private property was the height of government overreach. On Saturday, as Ickrath opened the mysterious padlocked home for the first time in years, he touched off a spontaneous outpouring among neighbors. From the outside, the home was a wreck. A barbed-wire fence had been erected to keep out squatters. Boards were missing from its porch, the columns were split, and exposed bare wood was everywhere. But inside, Ickrath’s flashlight revealed a startlingly different picture: wood floors were solid and didn’t creak or sag; “pocket doors,” which slide into the wall, were intact in the kitchen, and a wide, 10-foot Victorian-era door still separated a front sitting room from the foyer. Original molding and plaster construction remained on walls, ceilings and a dramatic, steep staircase. Sadly, damage was also much in evidence. Walls and floors were pockmarked and torn. Thieves had torn open a wall to steal copper pipes. Spots on the ceiling indicated water damage. Still, the new owners rejoiced at the home’s condition while other neighbors took turns blasting the city for almost destroying the place. Many had thought that the home was already on its way to repair. An anonymous Virginia man, dubbed the Mysterious Anonymous Benefactor, a friend of Dorothy Feaganes’s late husband, saw a newspaper article about the place and offered to restore it to allow Feaganes to live out her remaining years there this spring. Permits were filed. Work commenced. Feaganes, in her late 80s and in poor health, died soon thereafter. The work stopped. Feaganes’s children didn’t seem to want to take on the project, said their mother’s former lawyer. Efforts to reach the Feaganes family were unsuccessful. City Manager John Budesky said the home would be demolished the first week of June if the Feaganes family didn’t find a solution. That’s when Ickrath sprung into action with renewed fervor. He managed to have the short sale approved on Friday after much cajoling, more than a dozen phone calls to Terry Feaganes, and rushed back-and-forth negotiations with the city and the house’s bank, Reverse Mortgage Solutions. Last year, Manassas Mayor Harry “Hal” Parrish II (R) stunned many when he broke a 3 to 3 council tie on the issue, saying the house must be fixed or the city would demolish it under state blight laws. Parrish said Saturday that a “private-sector solution” is one he has always advocated for and was glad it had come to pass. “You have to give [Ickrath] great credit,” he said. Ickrath wasted little time this weekend. Freshly stacked plywood sat in his truck Saturday, and workers passed the pieces, two at a time, under the fence. Work commenced immediately on the dilapidated porch. Ickrath and the others hope to restore the house and then sell it to a family. As with all things Prescott House, the city has issued another ultimatum: Ickrath has 30 days to fix the porch and a back stoop, and secure a crumbling chimney. He has 45 days to put in new windows and make the place presentable. It’s a short time frame. But Ickrath said he has been assured by experts — some of whom live in the neighborhood — that it can be done.

Smaller lenders could get bigger slice of mortgage market thanks to new rules

There may come a time next year when heading to a community bank or a credit union for a mortgage may be more attractive than approaching a large bank. The government’s new mortgage rules, released Thursday, included a key standard — consumers can’t get a “qualified” mortgage if they have debts exceeding 43 percent of their income. But the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed an exemption for small creditors, which could give them an advantage, especially when they lend to low- and moderate-income communities. The consumer watchdog made clear the advantages of getting a qualified mortgage as it released the rules during a news conference in Baltimore. Homeowners with these types of loans have to meet stricter standards, but these mortgages will probably have lower rates and fewer fees. And banks will enjoy certain legal protections. Consumer advocates say the new standards could shut out first-time home buyers or others with low income. But this exemption for banks with less than $2 billion in assets could provide a pathway for these types of borrowers and offer credit unions and other small lenders a bigger slice of the mortgage market, currently dominated by a few big banks. “Community banks and credit unions did not cause the financial crisis,” Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau, said Thursday during a speech in Baltimore. “Their traditional model of relationship lending has been beneficial for many people in rural areas and small towns across this country.” In order to get this exemption, small banks with less than $2 billion in assets would have to keep the loans on their books, rather than sell them to investors around the world. The practice of packaging mortgages and trading them on financial markets has become common over the past decade and allowed banks to make a lot of money. But this method also encouraged risky lending because banks didn’t have to worry about facing losses if homeowners defaulted on their loans, analysts say. A majority of community banks keep their mortgages in-house anyway. “A long-term consquence of this rule is it could shift at least a certain class of borrowers toward community banks and away from the big national players because community banks will have more flexibility,” said Camden Fine, president and chief executive of the Independent Community Bankers of America. The industry trade group fought hard to exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets, but Fine said he was nonetheless pleased that the consumer bureau accomodated so many of his members. Smaller lenders have started to chip away at their bigger cousins’ market share. Behemoths such as Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America hold nearly half of the mortgage market. But credit unions posted $88.5 billion in mortgage loans through September 2012, compared with $53.9 billion a year earlier, according to the National Association of Federal Credit Unions. In Oakland, Md., mortgage business has picked up at First United Bank & Trust in the past year, though most of the activity is on the refinancing side. Chief executive Bill Grant said he is encouraged that regulators recognized that community banks have long been conservative in their lending standards. The CFPB is also giving small lenders flexibility with a more exotic type of mortgage called “balloon-payment loans.” These products, which require borrowers to pay lower amounts initially and save some of the biggest principal payments for the end of the life of the loan, tend to be popular in rural communities and small towns. These loans are also not subject to the 43 percent requirement but can still be considered qualified mortgages. The criteria for these balloon-payment loans are pretty narrow. Lenders have to make at least 50 percent of their mortgages in counties that are rural or underserved, and these areas can have no more than two major mortgage lenders.

An end to ‘too big to fail’

_Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, represents Ohio in the U.S. Senate._ Two years ago — after the worst financial crisis in more than a half-century — one-third of the Senate proclaimed that “too big to fail” is simply too big. A bipartisan group of 33 senators supported a proposal called the SAFE Banking Act, which I introduced with my former colleague, Ted Kaufman (D-Del.). This act would eliminate the taxpayer support enjoyed by the largest Wall Street banks — institutions that, by virtue of their size, could topple the entire U.S economy, should they fail. Our amendment did not pass the Senate, but to judge from the numerous recent calls to limit the size and risk of Wall Street banks — calls that are coming not only from public squares but from boardrooms too — it’s clear that this commonsense idea is starting to take hold. A few weeks ago, our nation’s largest bank revealed that it had lost $2 billion in a mere six weeks on trades that were supposedly intended to lessen its risk profile. Even at the best-managed firms, there are dangerous consequences of large, complex institutions undertaking large, complex activities. These companies are simply too big to manage, and they’re still too big to fail. While the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act made some important changes, the government might once again be tempted to bail out a megabank in trouble. When the Treasury Department decided which banks to rescue and which to let falter in the fall of 2008, it set the precedent that certain institutions are “too big to fail.” This status comes with an implicit guarantee from the federal government: As a result, ratings agencies give these megabanks a boost, and bondholders charge the banks less to borrow because they know that the government won’t let the institutions go under. Right now, about 20 of the nation’s largest banks can borrow money at a lower rate — ranging from 50 to 80 basis points by some estimates — than community banks can, thanks to this government guarantee. Should the U.S. government give Wall Street banks an advantage over Ohio’s First National Bank of Sycamore? Supporters of truly free markets would say “no.” And yet our nation’s policies favor the trillion-dollar banks, fueling their risky activities. This isn’t free-market economics. And it isn’t fair. Government support also encourages megabanks to take more risks, by raising less equity and relying more on debt, than their community-bank competition. Research by Thomas Hoenig, a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s board of directors, shows that such banks need either to raise $300 billion in capital or to shrink their balance sheets by $5 trillion to meet the same standards that the market requires of community banks. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. It’s Wall Street welfare. And absent decisive action, U.S. taxpayers will continue to subsidize the largest banks. That’s why I’ve reintroduced the SAFE Banking Act, which would end “too big to fail” once and for all by placing sensible size limits on our nation’s megabanks and ensuring that if they gamble, they have the resources to cover their losses. It would prevent any one bank from controlling more than 10 percent of federally insured deposits or assuming more than 10 percent of the U.S. financial sector’s liability. Under the bill, no bank could grow to more than 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product – with these limits reevaluated as the economy grows. Moreover, banks could not borrow more than $10 for every $1 of shareholder equity. These size limits would only affect the six largest Wall Street banks, who would have three years to downsize by selling assets or spinning off certain lines of business, as they see fit. Megabanks should fund themselves the same way that community banks do: by attracting more capital and taking on less debt. Wall Street banks should use investors’ money — not U.S. taxpayers’ money — to make their bets. It’s time for those who profess the virtues of the “free market” to put their equity where their mouth is. That means an end to the government guarantees that create a “heads I win, tails you lose” Wall Street culture. It means an end to picking winners and losers and an end to corporate welfare that gives trillion-dollar banks unfair advantages over regional and community banks. And it means preventing U.S. taxpayers from ever again being put in the position of having to bail out Wall Street. **Read more from Opinions:** Dana Milbank: Senators put federal regulators, not JPMorgan, on the hot seat The Post’s View: The Fed eases out Harold Meyerson: More Volcker rules might help The Post’s View: JPMorgan’s mishap bolsters case for Volcker rule

Man tries to rob bank on steamy day, rides off on bicycle

A man tried to rob a D.C. bank Friday afternoon during one of the hottest hours of the recent heat wave. Police say it was around 3:30 p.m. when the man entered the Wells Fargo branch on M Street SE. It was just about then when the temperature at Reagan National Airport reached 99 degrees, the high for the day. The branch is just around the corner from South Capitol Street and the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church with its Italianate bell tower. It is in a shiny new office building about 200 yards from the left field entrance to Nationals Park. The top of the building is visible to people sitting along the first base line. It was not clear what made the man choose that branch and that time of day. But once inside, according to a police account, he passed a note. It asked for money, and threatened the lives of customers in the bank, the police said. However, they said, he was given no money. The man, according to the police account, left the bank “without obtaining anything.” He was last seen on M Street, the police said, riding off into the steamy afternoon on a bicycle.

11th area bank-robbery attempt in 11 days is reported

A bank robbery in Anne Arundel County on Monday was at least the 11th robbery or attempted robbery at a financial institution in the Washington area in 11 days. Monday’s robbery occurred in the Odenton area and was carried out by three men who drew handguns and demanded money, the county police said. The robbers entered the Old Line bank in the 1100 block of Annapolis Road shortly after 10 a.m. and fled with an undetermined amount of cash, the police said. Several employees and customers were in the bank at the time, but none was injured, the police said. The robbery was the latest in a series that began Dec. 20 in the Hayfield area of Fairfax County. As in the Odenton incident, the robbers in the Hayfield holdup were armed. A robbery in Laurel on Dec. 21 also involved a weapon. In that incident, a shot was fired but no injuries were reported. The robber’s disguise was distinctive, and was described as a beard reminiscent of Santa Claus or of a character on the “Duck Dynasty” television show. In the majority of the incidents, no weapon was shown and demands were made orally or through a note. Surveillance cameras are in use at banks, and the robbers have generally tried to disguise their appearance by wearing hats or by wrapping scarves around their faces. In the Odenton holdup, police said the robbers’ faces were concealed by clothing. In a robbery that occurred in Alexandria on Saturday at the M&T bank branch in the 800 block of South Washington Street, the robber wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, the Alexandria police said. As in most of the other incidents, the robber made his demands in a note, which the police said he handed to a teller. The day before, a woman wearing a pink or red scarf that covered almost all of her head robbed a Capital One Bank branch in the 5800 block of Eastern Avenue in Prince George’s County. Police said the same woman held up a Capital One branch Dec. 2 in the 6200 block of Annapolis Road. The only robber to be rebuffed was the man who tried to get cash on Friday from a Citibank branch in Columbia Heights in the District. Like several of the other robbers, he passed a note to a teller, but the teller did not provide any money, and the man left. In a compilation of bank robbery figures, the FBI said a total of 5,546 federally insured financial institutions had been holdup targets throughout the United States in 2010. Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail

Costar: Bank branches getting smaller while online retailers turn to brick and mortar

Add banks to the list of retailers adjusting their brick-and-mortar strategies to adapt to the new times. Some predicted bank branches would be among the first to be displaced in a digital age. And while recent research by Accenture found that one-in-four customers would consider patronizing a branchless digital bank, many bank customers still value the store. In fact, 66 percent of customers still prefer to “talk to a person” rather than purchase a banking product online according to Accenture’s survey. Even with online banking becoming more convenient and easier for customers, branches still remain the pre-eminent sales channel and will for some time, according to Accenture, which found that nearly 60 percent of traditional bank products are sold through banks’ branch networks, which helps explain why the 25 largest retail banks spend more than $50 billion annually to maintain more than 43,000 branches across the nation. One noticeable change is that bank branches are getting smaller. A recent analysis of average space leased by banks in the Washington region found banks are leasing an average of 4,000 square feet, down from an average of approximately 6,500 square feet before the recession. Like other retailers, banks are making changes to their stores, replacing traditional teller-based services with more consultative ones. Banks are also starting to open up more micro-branches. Meanwhile, the trend of formerly Internet-only based companies expanding into a brick-and-mortar presence continues. This November, Rent the Runway will open its first standalone store in the Washington area at 3336 M St. NW. Bonobos, another clothing retailer located in Georgetown, doesn’t actually sell anything in their stores. They have a try-before-you-buy model that other retailers such as Warby Parker and Gap’s Piperlime have also adopted. As the changing size and role of bank branches demonstrates, as well as the long lines of shoppers lining up every time Apple releases a new product, it is becoming increasingly more evident that there can be a successful marriage of e-commerce and brick and mortar. Sean Goldberg is a research manager with CoStar Group in Washington, D.C. **More from Capital Business:** For a daily rundown of Washington area business news, sign up for the “CapBiz A.M.” e-mail newsletter.

Cardinal Bank revises Metro ad

Remember that image of a cardinal that was all over the Navy Yard-Nats Park Metro station as part of a Cardinal Bank station takeover? Well, that image is no longer. Great, great work here by Cardinal Bank and Herrmann Advertising. (Via @HerrmannAdv) **UPDATE:** A statement, from the bank: Sometimes it’s hard being a Cardinal. Especially when your loyalties lie with the Washington Nationals. Imagine how Cardinal Bank, a local community bank headquartered in McLean, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., took the news when – just weeks after launching a major advertising campaign featuring the bank’s Cardinal icon – their home team was paired with those _other_ Cards from St. Louis in the National League Division Series. The bank’s campaign even dominates the Metrorail station that serves the Nationals Ballpark. A large floor graphic of a Cardinal left some Nats fans seeing red as they walked toward the station’s elevators. But the bank took the curve ball in stride. It stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. Cardinal Bank is inviting Nats fans to “Stomp the Cardinals”…literally. When fans arrive for Game 4 of the division series on Thursday, Oct. 11, the huge floor graphic featuring the bank’s Cardinal icon will rally Nats fans with a call to stomp the competition.

Departing food bank leader sees hunger worsening in Washington area

As she prepares to retire, Lynn Brantley, 70, ought to be satisfied with her standout career as a Washington area do-gooder. Driven by the religious teachings of her Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing, Brantley has worked for 32 years as a key leader feeding the hungry in our region. A co-founder and longtime chief executive of the Capital Area Food Bank, she helped transform a small operation that served a few thousand people into a giant clearinghouse that collects and helps distribute groceries to nearly half a million needy. Despite that success, Brantley remains unsatisfied. She’s distressed that after so many years, the extent of hunger in our region is much more widespread than when she began. It used to be that families who relied on charity for food were concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods with entrenched poverty. Now the dependence has spread to numerous lower middle-class neighborhoods in the suburbs. It’s a sobering thought for those of us fortunate enough to worry mainly about what the scale will say after we pack away too many mashed potatoes at the Thanksgiving feast. “I can say now that the problem seems 10 times worse than it did when I started out. It’s a terrible way to be leaving, to be thinking that people are worse off than when we began,” Brantley said in an interview Thursday. “It’s the economy; it’s what’s happening with the middle class. That’s who’s coming to our agencies now,” she said. “These are people who are maybe working two and three jobs, and can’t make ends meet. These are people who’ve been laid off.” Brantley was mostly earnest and matter-of-fact as she reflected on her career in an interview in her office at the food bank’s brand-new, sprawling warehouse near Catholic University in Northeast. She is stepping down at the end of the year, to be succeeded by Nancy E. Roman, an executive at the UN World Food Programme. Brantley rattled off statistics about hunger and offered sociological analysis of why the problem continues to exist. But her voice cracked and she turned visibly emotional at several points when she recalled the need that she’s witnessed. It happened when she described seeing children at an after-school meals program at a low-income housing community in Northeast. “They sit down and they just use their hands to stuff their mouths, because they don’t get an evening meal. People don’t realize the conditions and what people are facing,” Brantley said. As she spoke, trucks at nearby loading docks were delivering fresh produce, canned and dry goods and other food and household items that the food bank buys or receives as donations. Some is “salvage” food, in slightly dented containers or with nearing use-by dates. At other docks, trucks carried away the food to 700 nonprofit organizations including food pantries, faith-based groups, churches and community centers. They give away bags or boxes of groceries to the needy in the District, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. The modern, 123,000-square-foot facility is quite a contrast with the cramped, leaky warehouse where Brantley and others launched the food bank in 1980 in response to cuts in federal food stamp programs. The operation had two volunteers and used shovels to unload trucks. Brantley became chief executive in 1988. Today the food bank has a staff of 133 and uses forklifts. Brantley was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s before she got involved in hunger issues as a food stamp outreach coordinator in Prince George’s County. Her motivation to help the underprivileged sprang from her roots in York County, Penn. “I went to a Lutheran parochial school and my grandparents were Quakers, so I was ingrained with a sense of the gospel in terms of where I came from and what I did,” Brantley said. She said food is “just a profound, moral right that people should have.” Although she tried to avoid saying anything overtly political, it was clear she wished the government would take a bigger role in helping the needy. “This is an important point, and something for people to really remember. Back in the ’70s, before the [food stamp] cuts came, hunger had nearly been obliterated in this country,” Brantley said. “When the cuts came, we as a country have never rebounded from that.” Now Brantley is looking forward to moving to a Quaker retirement community in Lewes, Del. She hopes to spend more time with her five grandchildren, and to enjoy her hobbies of bicycling and bird watching. She says she worries about the focus in Washington on cutting spending for domestic programs. “We’re looking at cuts coming down the road. It’s going to be hurting the most vulnerable people,” she said. At least she can comfort herself that she devoted her life’s work to softening the blow.

As companies relocate to big cities, suburban towns are left scrambling

OAK BROOK, Ill. — Visitors to the McDonald’s wooded corporate campus enter on a driveway named for the late chief executive Ray Kroc, then turn onto Ronald Lane before reaching Hamburger University, where more than 80,000 people have been trained as fast-food managers. Surrounded by quiet neighborhoods and easy highway connections, this 86-acre suburban compound adorned with walking paths and duck ponds was for four decades considered the ideal place to attract top executives as the company rose to global dominance. Now its leafy environs are considered a liability. Locked in a battle with companies of all stripes to woo top tech workers and young professionals, McDonald’s executives announced last year that they were putting the property up for sale and moving to the West Loop of Chicago where “L” trains arrive every few minutes and construction cranes dot the skyline. In Chicago, McDonald’s will join a slew of other companies — among them food conglomerate Kraft Heinz, commodities giant ADM and telecommunications firm Motorola Solutions — all looking to appeal to and be near young professionals versed in the world of e-commerce, software analytics, digital engineering, marketing and finance. Such relocations are happening across the country as economic opportunities shift to a handful of top cities and jobs become harder to find in some suburbs and smaller cities. Aetna recently announced that it will relocate from Hartford, Conn., to Manhattan; General Electric is leaving Connecticut to build a global headquarters in Boston; and Marriott International is moving from an emptying Maryland office park into the center of Bethesda. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said the old model where executives chose locations near where they wanted to live has been upturned by the growing influence of technology in nearly every industry. Years ago, IT operations were an afterthought. Now, people with such expertise are driving top-   level corporate decisions, and many of them prefer urban locales. “It used to be the IT division was in a back office somewhere,” Emanuel said. “The IT division and software, computer and data mining, et cetera, is now next to the CEO. Otherwise, that company is gone.” ****The migration to urban centers threatens the prosperity outlying suburbs have long enjoyed, bringing a dose of pain felt by rural communities and exacerbating stark gaps in earnings and wealth that Donald Trump capitalized on in winning the presidency. McDonald’s may not even be the most noteworthy corporate mover in Illinois. Machinery giant Caterpillar said this year that it was moving its headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, which is closer to Chicago. It said it would keep about 12,000 manufacturing, engineering and research jobs in its original home town. But top-   paying office jobs — the type that Caterpillar’s higher-ups enjoy — are being lost, and the company is canceling plans for a 3,200-person headquarters aimed at revitalizing Peoria’s downtown. “It was really hard. I mean, you know that $800 million headquarters translated into hundreds and hundreds of good construction jobs over a number of years,” Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis (R) said. Long term, the corporate moves threaten an orbit of smaller enterprises that fed on their proximity to the big companies, from restaurants and janitorial operations to subcontractors who located nearby. “The village of Oak Brook and McDonald’s sort of grew up together. So when the news came, it was a jolt from the blue — we were really not expecting it,” said Gopal G. Lalmalani, a cardiologist who also serves as the village president. Lalmalani is no stranger to the desire of young professionals to live in cities: His adult daughters, a lawyer and an actress, live in Chicago. When McDonald’s arrived in Oak Brook, in 1971, many Americans were migrating in the opposite direction, away from the city. In the years since, the tiny village’s identity became closely linked with the fast-food chain as McDonald’s forged a brand that spread across postwar suburbia one Happy Meal at a time. “It was fun to be traveling and tell someone you’re from Oak Brook and have them say, ‘Well, I never heard of that,’ and then tell them, ‘Yes, you have. Look at the back of the ketchup package from McDonald’s,’ ” said former village president Karen Bushy. Her son held his wedding reception at the hotel on campus, sometimes called McLodge. The village showed its gratitude — there is no property tax — and McDonald’s reciprocated with donations such as $100,000 annually for the Fourth of July fireworks display and with an outsize status for a town of fewer than 8,000 people. McDonald’s, though, came under pressure to update its offerings for the Internet age, so it opened an office in San Francisco and a year later moved additional digital operations to downtown Chicago, strategically near tech incubators as well as digital outposts of companies that included Yelp and eBay. Chief executive Steve Easterbrook, who took over in spring 2015, sought to keep innovating, launching mobile ordering, emphasizing self-serve kiosks in restaurants and expanding delivery through a partnership with UberEats. As McDonald’s embraced technology, it decided that it needed to be closer not just to workers who build e-commerce tools but also to the customers who use them, said Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary who is a McDonald’s executive vice president. That is because the next generation of fast-food consumers may be more likely to arrive via iPhones than drive- throughs. “The decision is really grounded in getting closer to our customers,” Gibbs said. The site of the new headquarters, being built in place of the studio where Oprah Winfrey’s show was filmed, is in Fulton Market, a bustling neighborhood filled with new apartments and some of the city’s most highly rated new restaurants. Bushy and others in Oak Brook wondered aloud if part of the reasoning for the relocation was to effectively get rid of the employees who have built lives around commuting to Oak Brook and may not follow the company downtown. Gibbs said that was not the intention. “Our assumption is not that some amount [of our staff] will not come. Some may not. In some ways that’s probably some personal decision. I think we’ve got a workforce that’s actually quite excited with the move,” he said. ****Chicago’s arrival as a magnet for corporations belies statistics that would normally give corporate movers pause. High homicide rates and concerns about the police department have eroded Emanuel’s popularity locally, but those issues seem confined to other parts of the city as young professionals crowd into the Loop, Chicago’s lively central business district. Chicago has been ranked the No. 1 city in the United States for corporate investment for the past four years by Site Selection Magazine, a real estate trade publication. Emanuel said crime is not something executives scouting new offices routinely express concerns about. Rather, he touts data points such as 140,000 — the number of new graduates local colleges produce every year. “Corporations tell me the number one concern that they have — workforce,” he said. To Peorians, Caterpillar’s change of heart came suddenly. Two years ago, the company’s leadership team joined state and local officials at a ceremony to announce plans for a new $800 million, 31-acre headquarters aimed at reviving a downtown pockmarked by vacant storefronts. “We’re here in Peoria to stay,” Caterpillar’s then-chief executive Doug Oberhelman declared at the time. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) stood to applaud. Then, in January of this year, Caterpillar abruptly canceled the Peoria headquarters complex and said it would move about 300 top executives to the Chicago area. The local reaction wasn’t just disappointment but bewilderment. Three generations of the city’s residents have worked at Caterpillar — designing, assembling and painting tractors and pipelayers. Like other firms, Caterpillar had a digital hub in downtown Chicago, just over a mile from the new McDonald’s headquarters. But now it is also moving many of its top executives away from where colleagues are designing, producing and shipping the company’s products — and the possibility of more Caterpillar jobs leaving looms. “There are definitely people in this region who don’t want to go to Chicago and are worried that their jobs are going there,” said Jennifer Daly, former chief executive of the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council. If more jobs go, it will diminish the options for highly qualified managers and executives who have chosen to make their homes in Peoria — a far more affordable, less congested place than Chicago or Deerfield. “The people who built this company from 1925 on were Peorians, they were Midwesterners, they weren’t city people,” said Rennie Atterbury, a longtime former Caterpillar executive and general counsel. The decision has left Peoria officials scrambling. They are focusing on different industries, such as health care, and helping the city’s other manufacturing firms to find work beyond building tractors. About 100 small manufacturers in the area rely largely on Caterpillar contracting work. “We really want to help them diversify,” Daly said. “These manufacturers are not used to having to pursue sales outside of the earth-moving industry.” Lee Powell in Peoria contributed to this report.

In Baltimore, few home loans for African Americans

What happens when Baltimore residents in predominantly African American neighborhoods try to obtain mortgage loans? The National Community Reinvestment Coalition set out to find the answer. We recently released a study looking at lending patterns in Baltimore and surrounding counties. We found stark racial disparities in mortgage lending. In Baltimore City, the most statistically significant factor in predicting home lending is race. In 2013, only 797 mortgage loans were made to African Americans in Baltimore City, compared with 1,999 to white borrowers, who represent a much smaller percentage of the population. We also found widespread disinvestment in the city and affluence in the surrounding suburbs. A borrower with a low or moderate income has a better chance of getting a loan in the suburbs than in the city of Baltimore. Baltimore City has a terrible history of redlining and racial discrimination. It was the first U.S. city to enact residential segregation laws aimed at African Americans, and it has a long and unfortunate record of racially restrictive covenants and other abhorrent discriminatory practices. As a result of these and other factors, the city today is afflicted with concentrated poverty and high levels of segregation. And the data show a paucity of lending in majority African American neighborhoods. If you were to take an affluent suburb and close all of the bank branches, and shut off the pipelines to responsible credit and basic banking services, inside of 20 years you would see boarded-up homes, struggling schools, vanishing businesses and economic depression. With banks absent, wealth-extracting institutions such as check cashers, payday lenders and pawn shops swoop in to fill the void. This only worsens matters. In other words, the presence, investment and responsible activity of banks and other depository institutions are essential for the health of a neighborhood. Homeownership is the single most effective mechanism for working people to build wealth and enter the middle class. When responsible homeownership opportunities are closed off for working families, it becomes much harder to climb the economic ladder and build intergenerational wealth. That means that fair access is essential to ending the cycle of poverty. In the United States, we have laws in place to ensure that banks can’t ignore or avoid serving people or neighborhoods based on their race or income. The Community Reinvestment Act places an affirmative obligation on banks to make safe and sound loans in the communities where they are chartered, including low- and moderate-income communities. The law is in place to prevent redlining and the exclusion of certain communities. In Baltimore, it’s pretty clear from the data that most banks are not living up to the obligation placed on them by the act. Until our financial institutions make a genuine and full commitment to serve creditworthy borrowers, regardless of their skin color or where they live, the economies in underserved neighborhoods will continue to deteriorate, and we will continue to have the dire circumstances we see in Baltimore and other parts of the country. **Read more about this issue:** Bethany McLean: Government-backed mortgage lenders are awful — and essential Catherine Rampell: Americans think owning a home is better for them than it is Charles Lane: The diminishing returns of today’s homeownership policies Robert J. Samuelson: The homeownership obsession

Christine Rush, CFO of Old Line Bank, on evolution in the banking industry

Christine Rush, the chief financial officer of Old Line Bank, will retire this May after 15 years at the Bowie-based bank. Rush, 57, worked behind the scenes to orchestrate the bank’s most recent acquisition — the $49 million purchase of Bowie-based Washington Savings Bank, which is expected to close in the second quarter and would push the bank’s assets over $1 billion. _Capital Business_ recently caught up with Rush to discuss her accidental foray into banking and the evolution of the industry. Here are excerpts from that conversation: _**You’re one of the few women in the area who holds a senior position at a bank. How did you get your start in what is still largely a male-dominated field?** _ I started out as a teller in 1974 at First National of St. Mary’s in St. Mary’s County. When I moved here from upstate New York, I had $150 in my pocket, a suitcase and a place to live. I was fresh out of high school, so my choices were somewhat limited. I applied for a job as a teller at First National, and got it. I went to school nights after that and got both my bachelor’s and my master’s degree [in finance at the University of Maryland]. The rest is history. _**Do you think that sort of career ladder — from being a teller to a top executive — still exists in banking?** _ I can’t say that I had a direct route up the chain because none of the banks — I’ve worked for three banks in my career — ... were related. I didn’t go directly from one to another. There was a period between First National and [the former] Signet [Bank] when I worked [in finance] on the corporate side. I was still involved with the banking world, but I wasn’t part of it. And then I went back to banking when I went to Signet. Signet gave me a lot of opportunities. I knew a lot about different areas of a bank, so coming here allowed me to grow. _**How did your experience from a larger bank translate to your role at Old Line Bank?** _ When I came here, I was originally a commercial lender, but we were so small — at that point we were probably the smallest bank in Charles County — that I could wear a lot of hats. So, you know, when you’re small, you don’t have a lot of resources to do things and you get an opportunity to do whatever needs to be done. When we decided to go public, I volunteered to be on the strategic planning committee, and then I got involved with doing the prospectus and writing it. And next thing I know, I’m chief financial officer. That was 10 years ago. _**How has the banking industry changed since you began in 1974?** _ The banking industry has changed significantly. There are many more players now, many different types of banks. Banking in 1974 was what a community bank is today for the most part. Now you see investment banks control a significantly large portion of the wealth, and there are a lot more specialty bankers within the industry. There are mortgage bankers and investment bankers and community bankers and big bankers. We all provide a very different service. Technology has also changed the industry significantly. We used to have a lot of foot traffic in the branches when I started. Then it went to ATMs, now we’re onto mobile banking and online banking, and who knows what next. I think that trend will continue. I remember when we used to move checks every day. Now we transmit images of checks. When I was a teller, we were writing cash-ins on notebook paper and added them up at the end of the day, and now computers do that. The regulatory environment is also much different. I don’t want to say more stringent, but it is pretty demanding today — way more so that it was 40 years ago. _**Why are you retiring now?** _ The last few years have been really time-consuming. We did the last acquisition and it absorbed a significant amount of my life over the last two years, so it seems like a good time to take a break and refocus. At this point, I don’t have any plans. For the short-term, I am not planning on anything. I don’t know if my opinion will change if I get bored but I want to spend some time doing some fun things. And I’m on the board of [The College of Southern Maryland] so I expect I’ll spend some more time doing volunteer work. **** _**What is the first thing you’re going to do on May 11, the day after you retire?** _ I’m going to get up in the morning, get out my bicycle and go for a ride. And then that afternoon, I’m going to play golf. After that I might start thinking about spring cleaning — but I’m not so sure.

Area banks brace for withdrawals as TAG program expires

Washington area community banks say they are bracing for large scale withdrawals when a special federal guarantee expires on Dec. 31 that safeguards money held in accounts that don’t earn interest. The temporary provision, called the Transaction Account Guarantee, was put into place by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. during the recession. It insures all funds in non-interest bearing bank accounts, which are typically used by municipalities and small businesses for payrolls. Once the provision expires, the FDIC will insure up to $250,000 in any given account, up from $100,000 before the financial crisis. When the program was first implemented in October 2008, some financial institutions such as Sandy Spring Bank in Olney say they had an influx of new clients and deposits. “The combination of the TAG program and falling interest rates led to a dramatic increase [in new customers and deposits] for us,” said John F. Goedeke Jr., a senior vice president at Sandy Spring Bank. “People started closing up their money market accounts. The logical place to put that money was in checking accounts where it was insured.” But that’s about to change. Earlier this month, the Senate decided to not renew the measure — and there is little chance, area bankers say, that the program will be resuscitated next year. Area banks say they’re anticipating a wave of withdrawals as customers move their money to larger banks that they perceive as more secure. “We’re well-capitalized, profitable, have a great credit rating,” said Ron Paul, chairman and chief executive of EagleBank in Bethesda. “Nonetheless, I think [customers] are going to go back to the mega banks. They’ve been assured by the government that mega banks are too big to fail. It’s a horrible, bad, poorly-thought out situation.” Some organizations, such as the American Health Assistance Foundation, require that all funds be FDIC insured. Now that the TAG program is set to expire, the Clarksburg-based nonprofit is looking for other places to put its funds. “Like many organizations, we want our money insured,” said Dave Marks, director of finance and administration. “We don’t want our money at risk, and we’re looking to put our investments in a safe place.” The FDIC is requiring banks to notify clients with more than $250,000 in their accounts of upcoming changes. Some, like Sandy Spring Bank, have taken the opportunity to reassure clients that their money will continue to be safe. “We’ve compiled a list of customers with balances in excess of $250,000 and are sending them a letter, explaining why TAG was implemented and telling them that the performance of the bank is very strong,” said Goedeke of Sandy Spring Bank, adding that less than 5 percent of the bank’s accounts would be affected. Some banks, though, worry that TAG’s expiration could affect the amount of money available to the bank to make loans to community residents and small businesses. “The reduction of our liquidity is going to have a substantial impact on our lending,” Paul said. “It’s a very, very big black eye for community banks — and I think it’s an even bigger black eye for the local economy.”

Do you need a bank checkup?

Here’s how I selected my first bank, the one I’ve been with for decades: A branch was a few blocks from my first job and on the way to the bus stop. I’ve gotten frustrated over the years with the customer service and the fees that kept adding up. I’ve threatened on numerous occasions to kick this big bank to the curb. But I haven’t yet (service got better, fees dropped because of how my husband and I bank). But if I ever do think we need to change, it won’t be because I was put off by the inconvenience of switching banks. There are so many choices that you don’t have to feel as if you’re being held hostage by a banking institution that has begun to get on your nerves. Banking is such a basic function of personal finance that you should consider a checkup. Are you getting what you need from your financial institution? If not, maybe you need some help in how to select the most cost-effective option for your banking needs. If you do, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the agency that specifically insures deposits at the nation’s 7,309 banks and savings associations, has put together useful tips in selecting a bank. The summer issue of its newsletter, FDIC Consumer News, offers a 10-question self-exam to figure out the best way to handle your banking needs at any financial institution, including a credit union. The test is particularly beneficial if you’re in the process of helping a teen or young adult open an account. I’ll get you started by walking through a few of the questions the FDIC recommends you consider. Top of the list is: How do you want to deposit money into an account? There is the tried-and-true direct deposit. But perhaps you’re old-fashioned and like to see a teller. Or maybe you want to deposit checks using your smartphone or other mobile devices. The bank where my 17-year-old daughter has her account just launched a mobile check-deposit feature. The bank promises she can deposit her checks securely without ever having to go to an ATM or bank branch. She downloaded the bank’s free mobile banking app onto her iPhone. She was shrieking with excitement. I was cringing. She took a picture of her last summer-job check — front and back. But soon her glee turned into frustration. She couldn’t get a good-enough image and had to go to the ATM after all. But she vowed to try the new mobile application again with her next check. Me, I’m sticking to direct deposit and the ATM. By the way, to save on checking fees, my daughter has an ATM-only checking-and-savings account. Next, ask yourself: How do you want to pay bills or buy goods? Have you become completely comfortable with using a debit card? The FDIC says that results from a recent pilot program at nine institutions offering electronic, card-based accounts found that “checkless checking” can reduce the risk of overdrawing accounts. When was the last time you shopped around to make sure you’ve got the best online banking options for the best price? Here are some questions you may not have asked in a long time. What is it costing me to stay at this bank? What does the bank charge for falling below the required minimum balance? Look at the fees you’ve paid over the past several months to a year. Are you getting your money’s worth in services? If not, another reason to see if another institution will do better. The FDIC also suggests you ask: Am I giving too much consideration to “rewards” or other special offers? “One-time deals . . . can induce consumers to select an account that isn’t necessarily the most cost-effective,” said Luke W. Reynolds, acting associate director of the FDIC’s Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection. To get the self-exam, go to www.fdic.gov. Search for “What’s the Right Account for Your Everyday Banking Needs?” The FDIC’s summer newsletter has a number of articles devoted to helping you get the most from your banking relationship. You’ll find a link to the issue at the bottom of the agency’s home page. It may be time for a banking checkup.

Bernanke: I saved the economy and all I got was this custom baseball card

The Federal Reserve's long good-bye to Ben S. Bernanke is over. Today was the last day in office for the man who has been credited with saving the U.S. economy – and, in turn, the world – from the next Great Depression. It's been a tumultuous eight years for Bernanke, who was appointed during the heights of the housing bubble and is leaving before the recovery has truly taken off. We reported earlier on the traditional farewell festivities for departing Fed governors, and now we have an update on how it actually went down: It started with a dinner Tuesday night with the central bank's top officials from across the country, who were gathered in Washington for their regular policy-setting meeting. Bernanke's wife, Anna, and former Fed vice chairman Don Kohn also attended. The event was held in the Fed dining room – the same one used for press conferences – and featured a menu of crab cakes, lentil soup, salad and a gluten-free dessert. One of the highlights of the evening were the remarks by incoming Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who jokingly recounted a falling asleep while watching Star Wars and dreaming of Bernanke as Obi-Wan Kenobi and herself as Luke Skywalker. A larger baseball-themed farewell with Fed staff was held on Thursday in the atrium. Hundreds of people crowded the marbled staircase and hallways of the building. There was popcorn, Crackerjacks and ice cream – but sadly no beer. And they passed around this custom baseball card with Bernanke's batting record:   Bernanke didn't get the traditional gifts of a crystal eagle – a replica of the one that graces the front of the Fed's headquarters – a chair with his nameplate, and framed dollar bills from each of the reserve bank districts. He already has one of each from his previous stint as a Fed governor before becoming chairman. Instead, the staff presented him with a few framed photographs. On Friday, he ate lunch in the Fed cafeteria, as he normally does. His desk was nearly cleaned out. And he attended a farewell for his executive assistant, Rita Proctor, who also retired the same day after 43 years at the central bank. She had planned to quit last year, but agreed to stay on one more year for Bernanke. He left the office as chairman for the last time in the middle of the afternoon. And for one of the first times in eight years, he is not expected to come into the office to work this weekend. The low-key exit was appropriate for a chairman who has made connecting with Main Street and increasing transparency two of his top priorities at the Fed. Bernanke has said that he plans to stay in Washington, at least for now. A Nationals fan, Bernanke pointed out that Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig plans to retire in a year.

When the kids provide a reverse mortgage to mom and dad

Could there be a way to help senior homeowners with their cash-flow needs without saddling them — and ultimately their families — with high costs? That’s a key question at a time when millions of seniors are flooding into their post-retirement years, many of them with equity in their homes but insufficient income to handle expenses over the long term. If they want to stay in their homes, they can opt for a government-insured reverse mortgage, which may provide them cash in exchange for repayment plus interest after they die, move out or sell. Or they can apply for a home equity line of credit from a bank. But there are problems with both choices. The dominant government-insured reverse mortgage program comes with high upfront lender fees, mortgage insurance premiums and newly toughened financial qualification requirements. A home equity credit line may be difficult for seniors to obtain because they cannot qualify on credit or debt-to-income grounds in today’s stricter underwriting environment. Starting May 1 nationwide, however, some seniors have a new option, one that ties into increasingly popular “peer-to-peer” lending. It’s a family-funded reverse mortgage known as the Caregiver loan. It allows any number of children and grandchildren to pool resources to provide a flexible line of credit at interest rates far below what commercial reverse-mortgage lenders charge and with far fewer hassles. In intra-family lending, there’s no bank or mortgage company. Family members are the bank. Here’s a simplified example: Say you and two siblings want to help Mom and Dad, who are in their late 70s. You and your siblings are all doing well enough that you have at least some cash to spare. Ultimately, you want to retain your parents’ house for the estate once your parents pass away, keep costs to a minimum and sell the property only when you, not a faraway bank, choose to do so. So you sit down with Mom and Dad and determine that, at least for the foreseeable future, they will need about $1,500 in additional income a month. You and your siblings agree to apportion the payments among yourselves in some way, maybe a commitment of $500 a month each for a period of years. You also pick an interest rate that achieves a win-win result for you and your parents — say, 3 percent annually. That’s much lower than a commercial lender would charge but higher than what you’ve been earning on your bank deposits or money market funds. There are no required fees upfront — hey, it’s Mom and Dad. What you need at this stage is help with putting all the details of your agreement into a legally binding reverse mortgage, recordable at the local courthouse. Enter National Family Mortgage, a Massachusetts-based company that has helped facilitate and service nearly $290 million in intra-family home loans in recent years — typically parents helping kids buy first homes. Now the company is expanding its menu to include reverse mortgages. Timothy Burke, National Family’s founder and chief executive, says the Caregiver concept is in response to requests from the company’s existing clients for a plan that helps with the post-retirement years. National Family does not loan money itself. Instead, it helps structure and customize lending arrangements among relatives: documentation, accounting, recordation, closing and servicing for home loans made by relatives who wish to keep the money in the family. For reverse mortgages, it offers step-by-step assistance online plus a calculator that allows participants to see how various contribution and disbursement arrangements would play out over time. National Family’s fee for its services: a flat $2,500. Can there be complications and downsides to an intra-family reverse mortgage? Absolutely. Although agreements can be tailored to almost any family’s needs, the fact remains that family members don’t always agree and don’t always get along. To handle this, the loan documents structured by National Family can make provisions for various eventualities. For example, individual co-lenders might have to drop out or reduce their contributions. Or Mom and Dad might forget to pay their property taxes or homeowner insurance, and somebody needs to be in charge of handling unexpected expenses. Burke recommends that total loan commitments not exceed 65 percent of the home’s current value and that all participants consult with professional financial advisers before signing on. Does this sort of deal work for every family? Hardly. But if you think it might fit for yours, check out the details at www.nationalfamilymortgage.com.

BALTIMORE — Rep. Elijah E. Cummings doesn’t need to go farther than his front stoop to see the scars of the housing crisis. “That one was foreclosed on,” the 61-year-old Maryland Democrat said on a recent morning outside his brick rowhouse in this city’s Madison Park neighborhood, pointing to an empty house nearby with a “No Trespassing” sign in the front window. “That house has been vacant now at least 9 months,” Cummings said, nodding across the street toward another home, its windows boarded shut. The owner lost his job and no longer could afford the payments, he said. “He was a good guy.” “This house here was in foreclosure,” Cummings said, pointing farther down the block. “I understand someone just bought it for a song and a dance.” Every community in the country has felt the sting of the housing bust, which has stretched into its sixth year. But in Cummings’s sprawling district — mostly urban, mostly African American, largely working- and middle-class — the foreclosure wave hit particularly hard. In recent years, Cummings has dedicated a substantial amount of time and energy — and outrage — trying to force changes he says would help stem the ripple effects of the foreclosure epidemic, particularly on minority communities that have suffered disproportionately from the fallout. Earlier this month, he held the seventh foreclosure-prevention workshop in his district. The events bring bank representatives together with struggling borrowers hoping to modify their loans and remain in their homes. In Washington, where he is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Cummings has become one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken lawmakers on the need for more government aid to troubled homeowners. He has also emerged as a fervent critic of Edward J. DeMarco, the chief regulator of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who has resisted proposals that the two firms reduce the amount certain borrowers owe on their mortgages. Cummings has backed efforts, some more successful than others, to investigate mortgage-related abuses by banks and lenders, to expand foreclosure protections for U.S. servicemembers and their families and to make it easier for some homeowners to refinance their loans at lower interest rates. He has even done something he rarely does on other topics: criticize the Obama administration, saying it hasn’t done enough to help those in need. When Cummings speaks about the foreclosure crisis, he talks of children displaced and neighborhoods destabilized, of lost pride and lowered expectations, of vanishing wealth, of anxious borrowers jolting awake at 4 a.m. with worries of how to make ends meet. “A lot of people say, let them be foreclosed upon because you are holding off the inevitable,” Cummings said. “I don’t see these folks who are losing their houses as some kind of collateral damage. This is usually their biggest investment in life. This is where they raise their family . . . The people that come to me, they don’t want a handout, they just want to be able to get through this storm.” It’s a feeling Cummings himself has known. In 1997, the company holding his mortgage initiated foreclosure proceedings after he missed six months of payments. He fell behind because of overdue tax bills, medical expenses and child-support payments, according to a Baltimore Sun __story that laterdetailed his financial woes. Cummings also said in an interview that giving up his law practice to run for Congress put a dent in his income. He eventually paid off his bills and caught up on his mortgage, but the brush with foreclosure has stuck with him. “That had an impact on me, because I could see how people could slip into a problem like that,” he said. His recent efforts to help others facing foreclosure have won Cummings admiration at home. “I live in his district, and I don’t think homeowners have a better friend in Congress,” said Marceline White, director of the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition. “You have neighborhoods that are fighting this issue everyday . . . He’s calling for what absolutely needs to be done.” Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D), who has also worked with Cummings closely on housing issues in the state, said many Maryland lawmakers have shown interest in helping homeowners, but Cummings “has made it his passion.” In Washington, Cummings hasn’t always garnered such praise. He has butted heads repeatedly with House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) , as well as with many other House Republicans. Cummings has repeatedly criticized Issa for not pressing harder to investigate banks and lenders accused of a wide range of foreclosure abuses and for opposing reductions in the mortgage balances of struggling borrowers. Issa says the practice could lead other homeowners to stop paying mortgages in hopes that the government would come to the rescue. Spokesman Frederick Hill said Issa has held numerous hearings on the foreclosure crisis during the past two years, including one in Cummings’s district. Hill said Issa doesn’t think anyone has made a convincing case for large-scale principal reductions, and instead prefers other tools such as principal forbearance, which allows borrowers to pay only the interest on a loan for a set amount of time in order to lower their payments. Issa also has argued that delaying foreclosures often postpones getting those homes into the hands of those who can afford them. “Many of the policies ranking member Cummings have advocated, these are the policies that have extended the length of the foreclosure crisis, rather than letting the market quickly adjust,” Hill said. “They’ve often been giveaways that put the onus on taxpayers.” DeMarco also has challenged the allegation that he has prevented Fannie and Freddie from reducing mortgage balances solely for ideological reasons, saying that he is not yet convinced such an approach would benefit taxpayers over time. Cummings is one of many officials trying to solve the complex consequences of the housing crisis. A recent $25 billion foreclosure settlement between the government and big banks could help a some borrowers. Other lawmakers have pushed forward with their own efforts, such as a bipartisan bill introduced in the House this month that would require Fannie and Freddie to set up principal-reduction pilot programs. As with those other efforts, Cummings acknowledges that his own success has been limited and that he has helped only a fraction of those in need. “I’ll take a family at a time, because I know that if it were not for certain things that we're doing, that would have been a family destabilized,” he said. “I’ll take the pieces. I just wish I could do more. I wish we could move even faster.” **More business stories fromThe Washington Post:** Wonkbook: How Republicans made it possible for Supreme Court to overturn insurance mandate Experts aren’t very good at predicting Supreme Court decisions, studies show Facebook names first female board member Wonkbook: Cheap oil won’t save the world’s economy Facebook to offer 'Find Friends Nearby' app

‘Move your money’ threatens big banks in 2012

Americans' trust in banks has fallen to a record low, with only 21 percent saying they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in them. That discontent could spur some to action. A new survey from Javelin Strategy and Research found that 11 percent of customers say they're likely or very likely to switch their primary bank over the next year. Big banks, moreover, are the most vulnerable: A quarter of all Citibank customers say they're likely to switch banks, and 21 percent of Bank of America customers say they're willing to do the same. New fees were a particularly notable complaint, Javelin says. What's at stake for these banks? The customers that say they're likely to switch banks hold an average of nearly $30,000 in deposits — "30% higher than the balances for customers who indicate they are unlikely or very unlikely to switch," Javelin says, amounting to $675 billion overall. It's not enough to bring down any of the biggest banks, but it could put a dent in their retail division. That said, Javelin points out that the convenience of big banks — lots of branches, ATMs, online and mobile banking services — often ends up trumping customer dissatisfaction. Just 3 percent of customers transferred their money in the last quarter of 2011, when Occupy Wall Street and other activists made a big push to support "Bank Transfer Day." "To compete, regional rivals, community banks and credit unions must smartly prioritize investments in technology that redefines personal banking and personal security by sharing control with customers — with an urgent emphasis on mobile banking and mobile deposit," Javelin concludes. Younger customers, in particular, could be particularly persuaded to switch over: More than half of those who transferred their accounts since early 2011 have been under 35.

Treasury Department renames building for post-Civil War black bank

A bank established just after the Civil War, meant for newly freed black Americans to save the first wages they ever earned, lasted less than 10 years. The Freedman’s Bank collapsed in 1874, wiping out most of the gains that its customers — about 100,000 people — had made in their first years of freedom. On Thursday, the 150th anniversary of the ill-fated experiment’s launch, the Freedman’s Bank at last had a moment of triumph: a commemorative plaque installed on the grounds where it once stood, along Lafayette Square near the White House. “The history of the Freedman’s Bank is a significant part of our economic legacy,” said Andrew Young, a former Georgia congressman, ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta. “When we look at the history of the African American integration into America, the one thing that’s been most difficult for us is to desegregate the money,’’ Young said. “ . . . To desegregate, to get the right to vote in a democracy, and not have access to capital is to only be halfway free. And we’ve always known that.” Young spoke at a ceremony Thursday along with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who announced that the Treasury Department would rename its annex to honor the Freedman’s Bank. The annex, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury building, was built on the site of the old bank during World War I . “To commemorate that legacy and to renew our commitment to the promise of financial inclusion and the opportunity of a better life, we’re naming the Treasury Annex Building the Freedman’s Bank Building,” Lew said. “This is a challenge that we still face today, and it’s a commitment that we need to renew today,” Lew added. “Many Americans, especially low-income and minority families, have little or no access to the financial system.” He spoke of the extra difficulty that people who have limited access to the banking system encounter when it comes to saving their earnings, obtaining a mortgage or getting a business loan, and the Treasury Department’s programs to help. Alden J. McDonald Jr., president of New Orleans-based Liberty Bank and Trust, also tied the history of the Freedman’s Bank to that of the more successful black-owned banks that came in the following century. McDonald said he has worked in banking for 50 years, including becoming in 1967 the first black banking officer in Louisiana. “The tradition of inclusive prosperity has had its starts and stops in the history of our country. The establishment of the Freedman’s Bank following the Civil War is one of the most inspiring efforts aimed at developing a stable middle class and reducing the disparity between rich and poor Americans,” McDonald said. Lew said he hopes that 150-year-old idea will continue to inspire visitors to Washington. Perhaps, he said, families walking down Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to visit the White House will see the new sign on the Treasury Annex Building and will pull out their smartphones to look up the story of the Freedman’s Bank. **Related reading:** A shattered foundation: Wealth of black families in Prince George’s has vanished Wealth inequality is even worse than income inequality Wealthy African American investors are far more conservative than whites

Nuclear Security Summit to impact transit, traffic and parking next week

President Barack Obama is hosting more than 50 world leaders for a summit in Washington next week, a high-profile event that is set to disrupt traffic, parking and transit in portions of downtown. The fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit to be held March 31 to April 1 at the Washington Convention Center, will close a portion of the busy New York Avenue corridor and shut down the Mount Vernon Square Metro station for two days. Parking restrictions around the convention center start Sunday, while commuters should expect the usual rolling closures near the White House, the State Department in Foggy Bottom, and around area hotels. The U.S. Secret Service, which has put together a list of closures, also warns of restrictions to pedestrian access in areas near the event.  But the impact could be beyond the restricted zone. There will be more motorcades than usual transporting summit participants, creating traffic problems elsewhere. The world leaders are in Washington to continue discussions on “the evolving threat” of nuclear terrorism and to identify steps “to minimize the use of highly-enriched uranium, secure vulnerable materials, counter nuclear smuggling and deter, detect, and disrupt attempts at nuclear terrorism,” according to a White House statement on the event. So it is a big deal, and there’s nothing we can do about it but prepare. The good news is this isn’t the first time we have had to deal with this type of event.  The first Nuclear Security Summit was held in the District in 2010- also at the Convention Center.  This year’s traffic and transit disruptions are expected to be similar to those. “The effects of the full-time street closings and the transit restrictions will ripple out for many blocks around Mount Vernon Square. The street closings will affect the major east-west commuter routes of Massachusetts and New York avenues, as well as north-south Seventh Street NW. The travel times for Metrobus, the D.C. Circulator and some of the suburban commuter buses will be thrown off,” our in-house expert, Dr. Gridlock, aka Robert Thomson, said. You should expect heightened security in the entire Metro system, he said, especially with the summit taking place just days after Tuesday’s terrorist attack in Brussels. So, if your commute takes you near the Washington Convention Center, start thinking about some alternative routes to get around next week. We will provide some tips and more details in coming days.  Now here’s what you should expect: **Impact on transit**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Metro will close the Mount Vernon Square Station station for two days, beginning at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30. Yellow and Green line trains will skip the station because the stop is within the secure perimeter for the summit. The station will re-open on Friday, April 1.  Most likely in the late evening after the U.S. Secret Service ends the security efforts there, Metro said. Your alternative: Gallery Place and Shaw-Howard stations. Buses serving stops on 7th and 9th streets NW, between N Street And K Street NW will be diverted around the Washington Convention Center. **Parking restrictions around the Washington Convention Center**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico You won’t be able to park in the following blocks from 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 27, until noon Saturday, April 2: Parking will not be allowed in the following blocks from 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30, until noon Saturday, April 2: **Road Closures**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The following roads will be closed starting at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30: **Around the White House**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There will be no residential or street parking in the following blocks for the duration of the summit and road closures will be in place 2 to 10 p.m. Thursday, March 31, from **Around the State Department**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico No residential or street parking allowed during the duration of the summit and road closures will take place 4 to 9  p.m. Thursday March 31.

Rejected for a mortgage? A community bank may be a viable option.

If you’ve been turned down for a mortgage by a mainstream bank — as many people have with the much-stricter rules now governing credit scores, income requirements and loan-to-debt ratios — a community bank may be a good option for you. The new Qualified Mortgage (QM) guidelines, which the federal government imposed on lenders in January, tightened already stringent rules introduced by the Dodd-Frank law and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The QM rules established a lower debt-to-income ratio — the amount of monthly income borrowers must have over and above debt payments has risen to 43 percent from 38 percent — making it much more difficult for first-time buyers as well as anyone with a non-standard financial profile to qualify for a loan. That means a buyer would need either less debt or more income than before. But local community banks are in a better position to set their own guidelines, which might make them a better alternative for borrowers who don’t qualify for loans with mainstream banks. Many local community banks can offer flexibility in their underwriting guidelines through in-house loans called portfolio loans. Michael Ahearn, senior vice president of residential lending at Congressional Bank in Bethesda, refers to this type of lending as taking a “common sense” approach. Lenders consider other factors they deem important rather than merely following a strict set of guidelines.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ahearn said that among the first questions he asks a potential borrower are: Who is he? What plan does he have for advancement? How was he referred to the bank? The answers to these questions help establish a relationship beyond a one-time transaction. Community banks may consider what type of job you have, and be willing to look at your current year’s income — rather than just basing their criteria on previous earnings. And since they are located in your local town or area, they are aware of certain factors that a large, out-of-state bank might not take into consideration. For example, they may know the neighborhood, the street the property is on or even the very house that you want to buy. They will be familiar with the proximity to good schools, local employment opportunities, freeway access or environmental conditions of the land. You will, of course, still need to have an acceptable credit score that shows a record of making payments on time — even if you hold a lot of debt — because the consistency of making minimum payments is what counts. You need to show that you don’t spend in excess of what you can afford and are responsible about using what funds you do have. To find a local bank, it’s a good strategy to select a local realty agent — the most active and well-regarded in the community you can find — and ask him or her to recommend a community bank. Ask your neighbors, friends, architect and even builders in the area about which bank in the community they may have used in the past. Request the name of their loan officer and ask if you can use his or her name as a referral. There are nearly 7,000 community banks in the United States, with more than 50,000 locations to choose from. If you don’t have personal contacts in your area, you can find one by logging on to _www.icba.org/consumer/BankLocator_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Do your best to establish a personal relationship with a loan officer, and then approach your first meeting like a job interview. Put your best foot forward and sell yourself (as well as your prospect for future financial advancement, upcoming partnerships, promotions, etc). There are tradeoffs to getting this type of loan. Be aware that portfolio loans typically have shorter terms than a traditional mortgage — a five- to 10-year term amortized over 30 years — and may carry an adjustable interest rate or even come with an origination fee. But as a stop-gap measure, they offer a borrower a way to get into a property and provide time to prepare down the road to refinance with a traditional mortgage. As long as you have an exit strategy, a portfolio loan may be the best possible solution to becoming a homeowner. _ **Sandy Gadow** , freelance writer and author of “The Complete Guide to Your Real Estate Closing,” is a former title officer and licensed real estate agent with more than 20 years experience. Gadow will answer readers’ questions in future columns. Contact her at sandragadow1@gmail.com._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Did Starbucks really need a policy to ban guns?

Last month, I wrote about the bizarreness that was Bring Your Gun To Starbucks Day, but this week (not in direct response to the shooting in Washington Navy Yard, a spokesman told the Post’s Tom Jackman), and from now on, Starbucks is celebrating a new holiday: Keep Your Gun At Home Day.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Admittedly, the policy at Starbucks before was simply to respect local law when it came to toting weapons. Open carry fine in this state? Then carry away!    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The earlier policy did not seem like a bold stance. It is not uncommon for businesses to abide by local laws. You don’t see large groups of clowns descending on Banks of America to celebrate the fact that Bank of America has no stated policy against clowns. Gun owners, on the other hand, took the absence of a ban as an open invitation to celebrate Open Carry Day at Starbucks. This was not exactly what Starbucks seemed to be expecting. Now they have a stated policy. According to a letter from CEO Howard Schultz:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This is just like every change in office policy ever. You thought this was common sense and you had no need to specify it, but then Anthony has one too many at the office party and now you have an official policy asking everyone Please Not To Sit Lewdly On The Photocopier, Then Climb Out Onto The Window Ledge And Try To Capture A Pigeon While Crying. Starbucks has now upgraded from Respecting Local Law to respectfully requesting that you leave your gun at home. You are still allowed to bring your ballista, tubs of boiling oil, and saber. You can bring your hunting knife and your chain mail, your full jousting equipment and faithful steed, if you can get him to stand patiently outside while you type away at your screenplay. Just, no guns. And if you needed an explanation, Starbucks even offers one. “From the beginning, our vision at Starbucks has been to create a “third place” between home and work where people can come together to enjoy the peace and pleasure of coffee and community. Our values have always centered on building community rather than dividing people, and our stores exist to give every customer a safe and comfortable respite from the concerns of daily life.” This is a little more complicated than the rationale I would have suggested, which is, “Why are you bringing a gun to a coffee shop?” The idea that a no-guns-in-the-coffee-shop-please policy might lead to a loss of custom depresses me. Is this the road we’re headed down? “Where should we get coffee?” “Depends. Where can I bring my lethal weapon?” “Why are you carrying a lethal weapon?” “I have concluded that this offers the best protection against other people with lethal weapons.” “How about _nobody_ brings a lethal weapon to the coffee shop?” “But then only bad people will bring lethal weapons.” “Is the only alternative to Only Dangerous People Carrying Weapons, Everyone Carrying Weapons All The Time? Do we really want to carry this fear with us? Even to get coffee? Even to the grocery store? Is this the kind of world in which we want to live?” “Okay, how about Dunkin Donuts?”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University I realize that lately I seem to be turning into a corporate shill who only writes about Starbucks, but I am not. I have been doing this for years, completely uncompensated. A brief Googling will reveal that one time I suggested as a “money-saving tip for interns” that if you bought Starbucks coffee in the morning you could get a dollar off Starbucks coffee in the afternoon, which as a money-saving tip is terrible but as an explanation of why I have no saved money checks out pretty well. My nest egg at this point is an incomplete of Star Wars Mountain Dew cans that I bought when Episode I came out, thinking, I guess, that they would accrue in value? I hope so. Only a couple of them have Jar Jar on them, so that’s something, right?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Starbucks is indeed a median place. And the baristas there already have enough to deal with, as Schultz points out, without having to ask individual customers to remove their guns: people who order complicated triple-whip-venti things with extra shots; that one gentleman in the corner in a strange hat who is compiling a detailed hand-written account of How To Keep The Aliens From Siphoning Agent Orange Into Our Well-Water; people who, when asked their names, reply, “My Name Is Jean Valjean” in ringing tones*; being called baristas in the first place. As social initiatives attempted by Starbucks go, this is not the worst of them. It is simply a polite request to customers not to bring weapons to a coffee shop, which seems fairly straightforward as requests go, as opposed to that time they decided to write, “Come Together” on orders near the Capital to see if it would fix the debt ceiling. That definitely wasn’t going to work. This is what happens when everything gets politicized, from your coffee (what does it think about gun rights?) to your chicken sandwich (tell me its opinions on everything!). But what happened to common sense? I miss the days when you didn’t need an explicit policy for this, when even if you could bring a gun to a coffee shop, it was assumed you wouldn’t, because — it’s a _coffee shop_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University *Sorry about that.

FBI, police hunt for bank burglar who cuts through walls in Georgetown, Woodley Park

D.C. police and the FBI are trying to determine whether one man is responsible for an unusual string of bank break-ins in Northwest Washington, getting inside by cutting holes in the walls of adjacent, vacant storefronts. Two break-ins occurred at the same Bank of America branch on Connecticut Avenue in Woodley Park: on May 24, 2011, and on Aug. 17 of this year. The latest occurred after 2 a.m. Friday at M&T; Bank on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, forcing the branch — which had just opened Aug. 6 — to close for the day and possibly on Saturday, a spokesman said. Police couldn’t say if the same person committed all the break-ins, but an FBI spokeswoman said that the “methods are very, very similar.” The culprit or culprits escaped empty-handed each time, police said, unable to get money from the automated teller machines that appeared to be the target. Police said that empty buildings are being used as a cover while someone cuts through the wall. A tool hasn’t been recovered, but surveillance photos have twice captured images of a person dressed in a white waterproof jumpsuit. “This very much looks like a serial robber,” said Doug Johnson, vice president of risk management for the American Bankers Association, a trade group based in Washington. He said those responsible “might expect to enjoy a certain level of anonymity” and have “time to accomplish their crime.” He added, “It’s up to us to frustrate all that and make sure they’re not successful in the future.” According to FBI statistics, there were 5,014 bank robberies in the United States last year, compared with 60 bank burglaries. In the District this year, there have been six bank robberies in addition to the three burglaries. At the M&T branch in Georgetown on Friday, FBI agents examined the scene in the 1400 block of Wisconsin Avenue, between O and P streets, lined with boutiques and coffeehouses. Passersby paused near the yellow crime tape that was draped between vintage-looking street lamps. The bank is between a clothing shop advertising a $99 sale on suits and a row of four vacant storefronts, their windows covered with brown paper and old signs pushing deals that expired long ago. In one spot, only the brick facade stood; behind it was a pile of rubble. The two break-ins at the Bank of America branch, in the 2600 block of Connecticut Avenue, caused significant structural damage. Surveillance pictures released by the FBI show that in the first break-in, the man appears to be wearing street clothes. His face was not fully visible. Pictures from subsequent break-ins show a man in the white jumpsuit, described by the FBI as a Tyvek suit, made by DuPont and resembling a decontamination suit. It’s commonly used by construction workers and people working with hazardous materials. During Friday’s break-in, he was also wearing a blue baseball cap.

Bank of Oklahoma exits market for short-term, high-interest loans

Bank of Oklahoma on Wednesday became the last bank to discontinue a short-term, high-interest loan product that has come under regulatory scrutiny. The move has consumer advocates cheering the demise of a product they say carried the same triple-digit interest rates and balloon payments as payday loans. Industry groups, however, have decried regulators for forcing banks out of a market that could be taken over by less regulated operators. In the past week, six banks have abandoned “deposit advance loans,” a form of credit tied to consumers’ paychecks, government benefits or other income directly deposited into their bank accounts. That effectively ended a service that regulators worried could pose safety and soundness risks for banks. The issue reached a climax in November, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. imposed tighter restrictions on the loans. Regulators did not ban banks from offering the product, but the new rules were strict enough to make the line of business unsustainable, banks say. Officials at all six of the banks that offered deposit advance loans, including Wells Fargo and Regions Financial, said the products they offered were incompatible with what regulators want. The OCC and FDIC, for example, have required banks to implement a “cooling-off period” that would prevent borrowers from taking more than one deposit advance loan during a monthly pay cycle. But some banks allowed customers to take small advances when needed. Rather than tailor their products to fit the new rules, banks chose to bow out. Access to Bank of Oklahoma’s “FastLoan” product will end May 31, according to the bank. Customers will soon receive a notice outlining the transition plan and alternative products that are available. “We understand the difficult situation many of our clients may be in as a result of its discontinuation,” Pat Piper, executive vice president of consumer banking at Bank of Oklahoma, said in an e-mail. “But we are dedicated to providing products that meet our clients’ needs and will be working to find another solution for these clients.” At least 15 states have banned deposit advance loans, while several others have enforced tough laws to limit the interest rates and the number of loans that can be made. Advocacy groups pressured states to take action as consumers became trapped in a debt cycle trying to pay off their loans. More than half of direct-deposit borrowers took out advances totaling $3,000 or more, according to a recent study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Of those borrowers, a majority paid off one loan and went back for another within 12 days. The average borrower took out 10 loans in a year and paid $458 in fees. Account holders typically paid up to $10 for every $100 borrowed, with the understanding that the loan will be repaid with their next direct deposit. If the deposited funds were not enough to cover the loan, the bank would take whatever money comes in and tack on overdraft fees and additional interest. In the absence of deposit advance loans, banks such as Regions are developing replacement products to meet the small-dollar credit needs of their customers. It is unknown whether those loans will run into the same trouble as their predecessors. The CFPB is slated this year to hand down rules to govern the payday and deposit advance market and add an extra layer of consumer protection.

What the Panama Papers don’t say about global finance is just as troubling

Documents from the secretive Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca reportedly suggest that major banks have helped well-heeled clients to conceal their money in anonymous accounts around the world. Yet those banks are sometimes denying accounts to clients in poor countries, on suspicion that they might be involved in laundering money, financing terrorism or avoiding taxes, according to experts on the international financial system.   The Washington Post has not reviewed the documents from Mossack Fonesca. Its representatives have said that they did nothing against the law. For many years, international regulators have worked to make avoiding taxes and funding illicit activity more difficult by getting banks to identify their customers. Yet since the financial crisis made banking less profitable, some banks have decided that vetting their less affluent, less lucrative customers isn't worth the expense, experts say. In part because of the risk of scrutiny from regulators and the press, firms such as Bank of America and Barclays are now reluctant to do business in poor countries where lawbreaking is more common. Banks' withdrawal from some markets in East Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and other regions has provoked an international debate about the costs and benefits of authorities' efforts to counter illicit finance. "Until very recently, there really wasn't a conversation," Paul said. Without careful attention from policymakers, he warned, "it's going to be poor populations and these high-risk jurisdictions that get cut out of the financial system." Diplomats and charities have lost their accounts. Meanwhile, migrants working in developed countries as breadwinners for their families in poorer nations are paying more to send them money through informal channels. In the private sector and among nonprofit groups, some worry that rules issued by the U.S. government, along with the European Union and a 35-nation body called the Financial Action Task Force, are making the problem worse.   "We recognize that reduced access could impede the flow of money for a family member in need," Szubin said, but he added, "We don't yet see evidence of systemic retrenchment -- and even if we truly are seeing some consolidation, we have not yet identified its scope."  Barclays did not say exactly why the accounts were closed, but some experts said the banks were concerned that their customers could be using the money for illicit purposes. Banks must comply with U.S. and international rules designed to prevent their clients from avoiding taxes, laundering money, circumventing sanctions or financing terrorism. These rules generally require banks to be sure that their customers are who they say they are. That can be a challenge in the developing world, where many governments don't issue official identification -- and when clients do present documents, tellers might not be able to determine with confidence whether they are genuine or forged, said Liat Shetret of the Global Center on Cooperative Security. She added that local governments might not be much help, depending on their recordkeeping.  Then there is the chance that those seeking to launder money or avoid taxes will corrupt banks' employees, noted economist Mike Moebs of Moebs Services, a research firm in Lake Forest, Ill. "It opens up the internal side of the financial institutions to somebody paying off a teller," he said. "There's always a way." Treasury officials point out there are other reasons that banks might be closing some clients' accounts. Interest rates have remained at near zero globally for several years. Also, banks have been required to be more conservative in their lending since the financial crisis. For both these reasons, making loans is less profitable for banks. Some of the accounts they managed in the past might now be losing money.  Sixteen of the global institutions reported that there were parts of the world in which they had terminated all relationships with their correspondent banks, especially in the Caribbean.  "There is a real risk that turning away customers could actually reduce transparency in the system by forcing transactions through unregulated channels," said Gloria Grandolini, a senior director at the World Bank, in a statement. It is impossible to know whether the World Bank's data is representative. There are no comprehensive data on the movement of money from banks in rich countries to their counterparties in the developing world. Yet Tom Keatinge, a former banker at JPMorgan Chase, disputed the Obama administration's more optimistic assessment of the data. He pointed to Syria, where he said that charities are having a hard time getting help to victims of the civil war. Banks do not want to honor any checks that charities might write to local merchants in exchange for food and supplies, since those merchants could also be violent Islamists, explained Keatinge, who is now at the Royal United Services Institute, the security-research organization in London. "It looks pretty systematic," he said. "The issue has become so entrenched over the past four or five years."

A.W. Clausen, former president of Bank of America and World Bank, dies at 89

A.W. Clausen, an American banker who rose to the highest echelons of his field nationally and internationally, serving twice as president of Bank of America with a stint as head of the World Bank in between, died Jan. 22 at a hospital in Burlingame, Calif. He was 89. He had complications from pneumonia, said his wife, Helen Clausen. Mr. Clausen, who was known as Tom, began his career more than six decades ago as a part-time cash counter toiling away in a Bank of America vault. He advanced through the management ranks of the bank and its parent company to become president and chief executive in 1970. Over the next decade, he led the San Francisco-based Bank of America through a period of burgeoning growth and profit. By the time he left, the once largely regional institution had become an international powerhouse. After his departure for the World Bank in 1981, Bank of America suffered devastating losses on loans — some of them undertaken during Mr. Clausen’s tenure — and he drew criticism for what his detractors regarded as his failure to invest sufficiently in new technology and loan management practices. He was recalled as chief executive at the end of his World Bank term in 1986. Over the next four years, Mr. Clausen successfully defended the beleaguered institution from a hostile takeover attempt by First Interstate Bancorp. Under his leadership, the bank shed a reported 20,000 jobs and sold off profitable divisions of the company to achieve fiscal recovery. The year before his retirement in 1990, Bank of America reported a net income of $1.1 billion, according to Bloomberg News. At the World Bank, Mr. Clausen succeeded Robert S. McNamara, the former defense secretary who had astronomically expanded the institution’s lending programs to developing nations and particularly to the poorest countries. Mr. Clausen was named World Bank president in 1980 in a pre-election agreement between President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and his successful challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, a Republican. The World Bank is a sort of cooperative in which dozens of countries are shareholders. As the largest shareholder, the United States traditionally selects the president. Mr. Clausen was a compromise candidate: a liberal Republican who had professed his commitment to private-sector entrepreneurship as well as foreign aid, which he regarded as beneficial for both the borrower and the lender. He took the World Bank job for a fraction of the salary he earned at Bank of America. The World Bank continued to grow under Mr. Clausen’s leadership, although not at the fast clip it had under McNamara. This was in large part because of the political and financial forces at work during the Reagan era. The conservative revolution led by Reagan had begun to turn U.S. policymaking against vast spending on foreign aid. Major powers such as West Germany and Japan also reduced their commitments to the bank. On the financial front, the global recession of the 1980s made loans all the more necessary for poor countries and all the more complicated for rich ones. Inflation meant that the World Bank had to borrow money at high interest rates while still carrying old loans given at low interest rates. Mr. Clausen’s “signal accomplishment” was his successful effort to “protect and preserve the major expansion in the bank’s role” in the world, said C. Fred Bergsten, undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs under Carter and director emeritus of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. He was a forceful advocate for the bank and defended it from conservatives who said it existed mainly to redistribute wealth. He said foreign lending was not a matter of mere altruism. Upon taking the post in 1981, he noted that one-third of American exports were bought by developing nations. “That’s the vested interest I’m talking about,” he said. “I don’t believe in transferring wealth,” he remarked, “but I believe in helping those that want to help themselves.” Alden Winship Clausen was born Feb. 17, 1923, in Hamilton, Ill. His father was owner and publisher of the city’s newspaper; his mother was a homemaker. The younger Clausen became known as “Tom” after portraying a boy with the same name in a school play. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., in 1944 before serving in the Army Air Forces in the final months of World War II. He received a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1949. Later that year, he joined Bank of America in California. The company placed him in an executive training program and made him a senior vice president when he was in his early 40s. As president, Mr. Clausen worked to refocus the institution on profit rather than on volume of loans. He decentralized the institution to give regional offices and local branches greater authority. Mr. Clausen was credited with growing assets from $25 billion to more than $100 billion and with turning the institution into one of the largest and most profitable commercial banks in the world. His wife of 51 years, the former Mary Margaret Crassweller, died in 2001. Survivors include his wife of 10 years, Helen Higgins Clausen of Hillsborough, Calif.; two sons from his first marriage, Eric Clausen of Daly City, Calif., and Mark Clausen of Chevy Chase; and five grandchildren. During his banking career, Mr. Clausen was a staunch advocate for lending to countries and people in need. “The hurt is now,” Mr. Clausen once told the New York Times. “Money is a lot more helpful than a warm handshake and a friendly smile.”

Police look for ties after another bank in Northwest Washington is robbed

First a bank on Connecticut Avenue NW in the Chevy Chase area of the District was the target of two robbery attempts in a recent three-week span. Then a bank a few blocks south on Connecticut was held up twice this week. Authorities have said they are looking for possible connections between at least two of the robberies. The latest incident occurred Thursday at the SunTrust branch in the 5000 block of Connecticut, several blocks north of the Van Ness-UDC Metro station. The robber presented a note and fled with cash. On Monday at the same branch, authorities said, a robber fled with cash after presenting a note. In the Oct. 16 attempt at a Citibank branch, police noted that bank employees used a tactic to avoid being robbed. “All employees walked away from the counter to the back room,” police said. Apparently recognizing that he had been thwarted, the would-be robber ran. Notes used Monday and on Oct. 16 were similar in wording, an FBI spokeswoman said earlier this week. The Oct. 16 Citibank attempt followed one on Sept. 28 at the same branch, police said. Physical descriptions in all four incidents show general similarities as well as some differences. The robber was described as black in all four, and with a mustache and beard in three. In the first of the four incidents, the robber was said to about 5 feet 9. Monday’s robber was described as about 5 feet 8. Thursday’s robber was said to be older than the others, with a mustache, but no beard.

A bank that may be too big for Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO — To dodge the global economic crisis, Brazil cranked up its spending, expanding subway lines and shipyards for oil platforms while building hydroelectric dams and stadiums for soccer’s 2014 World Cup. There would be no austerity as in Europe, Brazil’s leaders pointedly promised. And Brazil had a well-oiled machine to keep its economy humming: the state development bank, an institution little known outside this country but central to policymakers here. The bank has loaned a third of a trillion dollars since 2010, twice the amount the World Bank provided to about 100 countries combined, with much of the bounty going to the mining, agriculture and construction giants that are pillars of Brazil’s economy. Economists at BNDES, as the bank is known, say the benefits are felt evenly across Brazil: low unemployment and an economy that was kept on track while others seemed to careen out of control. But the global downturn is finally being felt in Latin America’s largest economy. And critics say a big part of the problem is Brazil’s strategy of doling out loans worth billions of dollars from the bank to the country’s richest and most politically connected companies. Economists and opposition leaders say this focus on Brazil’s “national champions” neglects smaller, nimbler firms that are developing new technologies and products to diversify a commodity-dependent economy. They also say that BNDES’s huge loans are fueling inflation that the Central Bank of Brazil must scramble to control. Sergio Lazzarini, who works at the Insper business school in S  ã o Paulo and writes about BNDES, said the bank’s role has become more difficult to justify in the face of an economy completing its third year of disappointing growth. “Despite these trends,” Lazzarini said, “the bank has become more aggressive, bigger, with more direct transfers from the government to the bank,” a reference to the treasury funds and payroll tax revenue used for loans. At the bank’s fortresslike offices in bustling downtown Rio, executives and economists speak proudly of a 61-year-old institution that has backed companies in the past decade whose growth helped make Brazil the world’s seventh-largest economy. Jo  ã o Ferraz, BNDES’s vice president, called such projects central to an economy that posted solid growth in the 2000s, capped by a blistering 7.5 percent expansion in 2010. “Can you build a hydroelectric plant with small firms? Can you build a pulp plant or a car factory with small firms?” Ferraz said. In approving loans, the bank considers the quality of the companies and the benefits of the projects, he said, calling critics misguided in accusing BNDES of cronyism. He spoke about one well-known recipient of BNDES loans, the construction giant Odebrecht, which has 175,000 employees in 26 countries and built BNDES’s modernist high-rise headquarters. “I am not friends with Odebrecht,” he said of the S  ã o Paulo-based conglomerate. “I am friends with the good projects of Odebrecht.” But Adriano Pires, a prominent government detractor and director of a consulting firm specializing in energy, said the bank’s disbursements — $81 billion this year, its biggest outlay ever — are generating worrisome levels of debt and an outsize role for the state in the economy. “What is the policy behind this?” Pires said. “It’s an ideology that holds that the state has to have a strong role in the economy.” Indeed, in exchange for loans, BNDES has acquired a minority stake in dozens of private companies, giving the bank’s executives a say in their operations. The bank also remains opaque about how it chooses which companies to shower with loans, said Jo  ã o Lopes Pinto, coordinator of the group More Democracy, which has met with bank officials to lobby for more transparency. Bank executives say they are working to be more forthcoming, although they say regulations prevent them from providing details about loans. With disbursements having gone up by a factor of five over the past decade, Pinto said, there has been more of a windfall for big borrowers such as the S ã o Paulo-based meatpacker JBS. A decade ago, JBS wasn’t even among Brazil’s top 400 companies. But BNDES provided $4.4 billion from 2008 to 2010, essential as the company went abroad to acquire Swift, National Beef, Smithfield Beef and Pilgrim’s Pride. That made JBS a worldwide leader in beef production. In 2010, JBS was also the largest contributor to President Dilma Rousseff’s campaign, donating $4.7 million, according to a report on BNDES and Brazil’s economy by Mansueto Almeida, an economist at the government-funded Institute of Applied Economic Research. He questions what Brazil has gotten out of supporting the company in its heavy expansion into the U.S. market. “I don’t see any kind of social outcome or social return that would justify BNDES in promoting this firm,” Almeida said. JBS declined to comment. Almeida said the problem is that BNDES often acts as an investment bank, not a public institution focused on fostering social development. In contrast, Almeida said, fast-developing South Korea boosted dynamic companies that developed electronics, among them Samsung. “In Brazil, we don’t do that,” Almeida said. “We give you subsidized credit so you can do the same thing or go overseas and buy your competitors.” Ferraz, the BNDES vice president, said such assertions overlook an increasingly diverse portfolio. He said the bank is focusing more on companies with gross revenues of $40 million or less, in categories the bank calls micro, small or medium-size. In 2009, 21 percent of loans went to those companies; this year, 37 percent has been provided to them, according to bank documents. The bank is also accelerating spending on projects that economists say the country desperately needs, such as energy generation plants, highways, ports, airports and other infrastructure that “will be a big driver of economic growth,” said Nelson Siffert, BNDES’s superintendent for infrastructure. Still, the bank’s relationship with giant companies and well-connected billionaires has created problems for its executives and government. Although BNDES was not explicitly one of their targets, protesters who staged huge nationwide rallies in June directed much of their ire at government policies they said benefit the elite in a country of grinding income inequality. One was would-be oil baron Eike Batista, a flamboyant billionaire whose EBX Group received more than $4 billion in loans, prompting him to call BNDES “the best bank in the world.” But now his empire is collapsing, and opposition leaders are questioning BNDES over its support of his money-losing companies. “The money cannot go to a few lucky ones,” said C  é sar Colnago, an opposition lawmaker in Congress. Batista’s office did not return calls seeking comment. To be sure, credit is expensive in Brazil and BNDES fills that need, particularly the huge loans needed by companies such as the state-controlled Petrobras oil giant and Vale, a mining company that has $5 billion in outstanding loans from the bank. Vale has grown into a $46 billion company employing tens of thousands of workers. Sonia Zagury, global head of finance at Vale, said BNDES’s role “in the Brazilian economy is an important one, and they are an important partner for Vale.” But analysts say there is another downside to BNDES’s big spending: It fans inflation, which has remained stubbornly high at just under 6 percent a year. To keep it under control, the Central Bank on Nov. 27 raised its benchmark rate to 10 percent. Such a high interest rate — the highest of any developed country — is believed to crowd out the development of private lenders. That leaves companies perpetually dependent on BNDES and its cheaper loans, according to Almeida, the economist. “No bank, no matter how smart it is, can compete with a bank that receives subsides from the government,” he said. Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

After 33 years, Washington’s last video store closes its doors

Anne Marie Haynes walked into Potomac Video on a recent afternoon, just as she has done nearly every week for the past 20 years. But this time, “going out of business” signs were taped to the front door. All of the store’s 60,000 DVDs had been marked for final sale. “Oh my God, this is so bad, ” the Cleveland Park resident said. “I’ve been coming here ever since they opened, every Friday night. Why did it have to close?” The closing of Potomac Video, the last-standing video store in Washington, after 33 years marks the end of an industry that for many local residents fizzled years ago. The rise of Netflix, the popularity of streaming video and the ubiquitous presence of on-demand television channels have slowly eroded the movie rental industry, analysts say. Nationally, the number of video stores has dropped drastically, to 6,650 in 2011 from 17,828 in 2006, according to the Census Bureau. In its heyday, Potomac Video had 24 stores, and its flagship in the District’s Chevy Chase neighborhood brought in $1 million a year. But recently, there were times when monthly sales barely covered the store’s overhead costs of $25,000. **** For regulars of Potomac Video, many of whom have been frequenting the shop since it opened in the 1980s, the news has dealt a particularly brutal blow. On a recent Saturday, a couple dozen customers browsed the shelves. Video cassettes were marked down to 25 cents, while DVDs ranged from $3 to $10. Movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa had already sold out. One customer spent $1,000 buying the store’s entire German film section. Another bought every war movie in sight. Laura Silvers, 69, scooped up $240 worth of movies — at least 60 DVDs, she says — that are now scattered on the bed and floor of her one-bedroom Chevy Chase apartment. If she rations them out, three or four movies per week, they might just last until September, she said. “I didn’t have many movies before,” Silver said. “I mean, why would I need to? I always had the video store.” The area’s last pure movie rental shop was also one of its first. When Benson Fogle founded Potomac Video in 1981, he says he knew of only one competitor: An electronics store on Rockville Pike that dabbled in video rentals. Fogle, a geophysicist, got the idea for the shop during a research trip to Antarctica. He had read a story in the New York Times about a coming revolution in home entertainment, he said. Movie rental shops had begun cropping up in Los Angeles, and Fogle thought it would be a good way to catch up on films he had missed during his trips to the South Pole. When he returned to Potomac in the spring, Fogle rented a small storefront and ordered 4,000 movies. He invested $75,000 into the company — money he’d made buying, and then selling, defunct gold mines in Colorado — and got started. He opened on April 1. It was an April Fool’s joke of sorts, Fogle says: He made a bet with his employees that the store would last five years, tops. The business was an instant hit. “Immediately, it took off,” said Fogle, 78. “I never would’ve thought it could be so easy to open a business.” Within 18 months, the company’s first store doubled in size, expanding to 1,650 square feet and 8,000 movies. “People were buying [VCR] machines at a rapid pace in those days,” Fogle said. “That was the Christmas present everyone wanted.” A few years later, Fogle quit his job at the National Science Foundation and opened his second shop, on MacArthur Boulevard. Erol’s, a regional chain, and Blockbuster had also begun cropping up in the area, but Fogle said demand was so steady that it didn’t matter. Potomac Video kept expanding: To Chevy Chase and Georgetown, and into Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia until there were two dozen stores. Fogle took the profits from his business and invested in local real estate. But in 2004, that growth began to slow as Netflix’s DVD-in-the-mail and Red Box’s vending-machine kiosks gained ground. All of a sudden, Fogle says, instead of opening new locations, the company pivoted. By the summer of 2010, Potomac Video was down to a handful of stores. Blockbuster, founded in Dallas in 1985, filed for bankruptcy that same year. In 2011, the national chain sold off all remaining stores. “Once Internet-based distribution hit, that’s when the steady hemorrhaging began,” said Joshua M. Greenberg, a program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and who has written a book about the video rental industry. Greenberg added that the rising popularity of television shows hasn’t helped matters. “It is a lot easier to binge-watch something when you can stream 12 hours in a row,” he said. “There’s no need to watch just one DVD at a time anymore.” It takes about six weeks to sell off a storeful of movies. Fogle knows this well because he’s done it 23 times in the past 10 years. Now as he prepares to close his last store, he also knows what comes next: One week of disassembling metal racks, another week of boxing up leftover DVDs and shipping them off to wholesalers. And then employees will take turns breaking down the counters with a sledgehammer. They’ll patch holes in the wall, vacuum the floors and turn the property over to the landlord. And just like that, Fogle’s 33-year business will be gone. “It was inevitable this would happen,” he said. “Sooner or later, I knew the train ride would have to end.” For his part, Fogle plans to spend his time restoring the Shenandoah Hotel, which he bought in 2001, and a handful of other historical buildings he’s purchased over the years. Mostly though, he says he worries about the eight remaining employees who will be out of jobs. Store Manager Jon Francke, who has a film degree from Syracuse University, has been working for the company 20 years. General Manager Matt McNevin, a 15-year veteran, teaches screenwriting at American University and makes films on the side. “The staff is a walking encyclopedia,” said Aviva Kempner, a documentary filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. “I’d come in and say, ‘I need footage of young Abe Lincoln’ or ‘I need a scene that shows the Great Migration,’ and there it is. Jon and Matt knew films inside and out.” The staff special-ordered movies, too, tailoring each store’s collection to match its clientele. The Chevy Chase store, for example, leaned heavily toward British comedies and foreign films. In the early 2000s, when business was booming, Francke bought $1 million worth of new DVDs every year. “To me, the biggest tragedy is that there are a lot of great movies in that store,” said McNevin, 38. “And when we’re gone, they’ll be gone.” About a year ago, when it became clear Potomac Video wouldn’t last, Fogle and his team came up with a number of ways to keep the company afloat. They began selling out-of-print movies and other rare finds on Amazon.com. It helped bring in extra money and kept the store open for an extra year, McNevin said. (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos owns _The Washington Post_ and _Capital Business_.) “We had some movies sitting on the shelf for 10 years,” Mc Nevin said. “If we could sell them online for $100, why not?” They toyed with other ideas, too — a subscription service, for example, or offering delivery. But none of those seemed like practical undertakings for a mom-and-pop shop that was losing between $3,000 and $4,000 every month. They decided to close in the spring. April 2013 had been the worst month in decades, McNevin said, and he expected this year to be worse. On April 9, 33 years after it opened, Potomac Video began selling off the last of its inventory. The irony, McNevin said, was that business was quite brisk this winter. The big February snowstorm was one of the busiest times in recent history. “We’d do really well during snowstorms, or if it was raining, we’d do okay,” Nevin said. “It became way too contingent on what was happening outside. By the end of the year, it would’ve been a losing proposition.” Anna Lake stopped by Potomac Video for what would likely be the last of dozens of visits. She had come looking for one DVD in particular: “The Unfinished Song,” a 2012 film starring Vanessa Redgrave. But it was already gone. “I hope I can get it on Amazon,” the 83-year-old said. “That’s what the guys up front recommended.” **** Across the store, Henry Carr, 22, said he hadn’t been to Potomac Video in years. As a kid, he had come almost every week. “I’m literally working my way through the aisles,” he said as he combed through the drama section. “I’m looking for anything with Tom Hanks.” About 15 minutes into his visit, he’d picked up a stack of eight movies. They included “The Soloist,” “Road to Perdition,” “Pacific Rim” (which, on second thought, he might put back) and “The Sting” — none of which were available for streaming on Netflix. “To be honest, I have shifted over mostly to Netflix,” Carr said. “I’m not very surprised this store is closing.” “But,” he added, “it is a bummer.”

Post office closings may increase rural isolation, economic disparity

Postal officials were blunt in December when they stood before 120 residents in Dedham, Iowa, to tell them why their town’s post office has to close. The Internet, officials said, was killing the U.S. Postal Service. “Well, I have no Internet,” resident Judy Ankenbauer said at the meeting. Like many of Dedham’s 280 residents, Ankenbauer said she still relies on the post office to buy stamps and send letters and packages. Dedham is hardly alone in its dependence on the Postal Service. Some of the nation’s poorest communities, many of them with spotty broadband Internet coverage, stand to suffer most if the struggling agency moves ahead with plans to shutter thousands of post offices this year, a Reuters analysis found. Nearly 80 percent of the 3,830 post offices under consideration are in sparsely populated rural areas where poverty rates are higher than the national average. Moreover, about one-third of the offices slated for closure fall in areas with limited or no wired broadband Internet. “We’re not the ones in the big cities who are just e-mailing everything to everybody. We’re the ones that are actually still sending our Christmas cards and our birthday cards,” said Sarah Clyden, who runs a feed store in Oakwood, Okla., where the agency is considering closing the post office. Federal law requires the Postal Service to provide “a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services” to rural areas and small towns. Today, with 32,000 retail locations and 150 million delivery points, the Postal Service has a larger footprint in the United States than McDonald’s, Starbucks and Wal-Mart combined, according to its Web site. Even so, the rise of e-mail, a drop-off in first-class mail, onerous labor costs and the growth of shippers such as UPS and FedEx have left the Postal Service hemorrhaging money. By fall, postal officials have warned, they might not be able to borrow money. The Postal Service is not studying the economic impact on communities where post offices are slated to close, spokesman David Partenheimer said. But in the 3,004 rural areas across 48 states where post offices might close, many residents fear the impact will be pronounced. About 2.9 million people live in the rural communities where a post office that might close is the only one or one of two serving their Zip code. For many rural residents, that would translate into longer drives to mail packages, pay bills or buy stamps. Like all the post offices on the closure lists, the post offices in Dedham and Oakwood wouldn’t close until mid-May, thanks to a temporary moratorium on closings put in place in December. It was intended to give Congress a window to pass legislation offering the Postal Service some relief. But with lawmakers still deeply divided over how to address the Postal Service’s financial woes, state and local government officials worry thousands of closings are on the way. “The Postal Service is supposed to be a universal service available to people wherever they live in America,” said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R), who pushed hard for the moratorium. “What they’re doing is going against that premise.” The Postal Service chose post offices for possible closure based primarily on revenue. Two-thirds of the 3,830 post offices slated for closure made less than $27,500 in annual sales, postal data show. Nearly 90 percent of them are in rural areas, where shrinking populations and dwindling businesses mean the post offices simply cost more to operate than they earn. “These offices are decreasing in revenue year after year after year,” said Dean Granholm, the Postal Service’s vice president for delivery. Despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the Postal Service declined to provide data on revenue for individual post offices. But it did provide expense data for all post offices. The statistics show that closing all the post offices under consideration would save about $295 million a year, about four-tenths of 1 percent of the Postal Service’s annual expenses of $70 billion. “That’s a drop in the bucket,” said William Henderson, postmaster general from 1998 to 2001. Then he corrected himself. “That’s not even a drop in the bucket. The bucket won’t ripple.” The Postal Service says the closures are necessary because people increasingly are turning to the Internet to send e-mail and pay bills, resulting in plummeting mail volume and revenue. “We’ve lost our business to the, you know, online communications,” Kent Gochenour, an Iowa postal official, told residents at the town hall in Dedham. To match the falling demand, the agency says it needs to cut $20 billion in operating expenses by 2015. Restructuring health-care programs, eliminating jobs, ending Saturday delivery and closing post offices are among the moves considered, though some of them would require permission from a Congress that remains deeply divided on how to address the Postal Service’s woes. “When you deal with billions, there’s nothing that you should ignore, even if it’s only a couple percentage points of your total operating costs,” Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said. But for many in the communities where post offices are slated to close, doing business online is not an easy option. Trinchera, Colo., a rural town near the New Mexico state line, lacks wired broadband. Rancher Carlos Sandoval said he relies on the post office for everything except groceries. He said he uses a computer only when he visits his daughter “in town” — Trinidad, Colo., about 15 miles from his home. Like Sandoval, about a third of the 110 people served by the Trinchera post office have no Internet access, according to Gene Caldwell. The 82-year-old began mustering statistics last fall to share with postal officials at a community meeting. Many residents live as many as 50 miles from the nearest town, and to get there, they travel mostly on unpaved roads, Caldwell said. They rely on the Postal Service for livestock vaccinations and medicines, notices of livestock sales, trade newspapers and other items. Nationwide, about 1.7 million people live near post offices slated for closure in areas with limited or no broadband Internet service. “We’re targeting the wrong people,” said Mark Strong, president of the National League of Postmasters. “We probably should have taken a look to see if first of all they have Internet accessibility in their communities.” Internet access has spread the way most businesses expand: to areas more densely populated with people willing to pay for the service. Today, rural areas remain less connected to the Internet than urban populations across every technology type, according to Commerce Department data. Nearly 90 percent of the 24 million Americans without wired broadband access live in rural areas. “There’s still a real digital divide between rural and urban America,” said Ed Luttrell, head of the National Grange, which represents rural areas. “You look at rural folks, they tend to rely much more heavily on the Postal Service for delivery of a wide variety of necessities.” Reuters gauged communities’ Internet connectivity by comparing their locations with a national map of wired broadband availability that’s compiled by the Commerce Department. Areas were identified that met the most basic government threshold of 768 kilobyte per-second-download speed, which corresponds roughly to the 3G service on most phones. In areas lacking wired broadband, residents may connect online through a satellite or wireless provider. But higher costs and lower dependability often discourage individuals and businesses from using the Internet for commercial transactions, and many older residents have never trusted online commerce or owned a computer. “I have a phone, a newspaper and a post office. And the post office is No. 1,” said Ankenbauer, 59. Elsewhere, the steady flow of personal and business communications online has chipped away at mail volume. In 2002, first class mail, the Postal Service’s most profitable product, began to decline. The downturn exacerbated the drop-off. Total mail volumes have fallen more than 20 percent since 2006, and an additional 24 percent decline is predicted by 2020. Granholm said the agency is offering a range of substitutes for traditional post offices services because the Postal Service does not consider its Web site a complete replacement. Still, “if customers do have broadband access, I think a lot of customers would choose to use our online service,” Granholm said. Losing a post office could stifle small businesses and prevent towns from recruiting new employers, residents say. Most of the closings are in rural areas, where the poverty rates for surrounding communities are higher than the national average of 15.3 percent. In communities with limited or no broadband Internet, the economic disparities are even more pronounced. “The postmaster general doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on in rural America, and it shows,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said. In Allen, S.D., a town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where almost all the residents live below the poverty line, Warren Yellow Hair wants to make more money by scaling up his mail-order art business to include Internet sales now that he has bought his first computer. But with the Allen post office slated for closure, Yellow Hair worries that he will have to drive 40 miles round-trip to mail his tipis, drums and drawings to customers. “I’ll just have to pass the charge on to the customer, and I sure don’t want to do that,” Yellow Hair said. Business owners across the country are making similar calculations. Sharon Voss, who runs a produce market in Copalis Crossing, Wash., thinks her customers would pay to have fruits and vegetables mailed each week to elderly family members who live alone. But she said she might rethink a mail-order expansion if the post office will no longer be down the block. Ron Christensen of Lohrville, Iowa, relies on low Postal Service shipping rates to keep afloat his Air Electric Machine Co., which makes ornamental steel windmills. If the post office closes, he plans to drive 17 miles round-trip to the next nearest one to avoid paying extra through UPS or FedEx. About 3,250 of the 3,830 post offices on the closure lists fall in Zip codes where UPS and FedEx charge more for delivery. Town mayors and chambers of commerce also worry about the broader economic impact of losing a post office. With small populations, remote locations and a lack of reliable Internet, many towns are already a tough sell to new businesses. The Postal Service is touting alternatives to brick-and-mortar post offices. One strategy has the agency contracting with some local businesses to offer basic postal services. Six months after announcing the Village Post Office plan, the Postal Service had fewer than a dozen fully operating. “In some of these areas . . . there is no option to have a Village Post Office because there’s no stores or other facilities,” Donahoe said. Another plan is to expand the use of rural letter carriers, who are equipped to sell stamps, pick up packages and fulfill money orders, in addition to delivering the mail, Granholm said. The carriers, who already serve many rural communities, would also drop off packages and other items at roadside mailboxes or clustered mailboxes in a central location. Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, said rural carriers can provide a variety of services for residents who cannot easily access a post office. But they are not a full replacement for a physical post office. “I don’t believe it’s the most cost-efficient thing for them to do, to just say we’re going to close every small post office,” Dwyer said. “The American public has to have service.” Many residents said they are wary of relying on a rural carrier for time-sensitive or valuable packages. Carriers might not be deterred by snow or sleet, but some customers say they would be. “I’m not standing out in the blizzard waiting for them,” Christensen said. “How is that going to be convenient for us?”

India pushes bank accounts for the poor in bid to share benefits of economic growth

PRANGARH, India — Raj Kumar Sharma, a milk-seller with just one cow, used to think bank accounts were “only for important people.” That changed after he heard a pitchman in the village lane beating a drum and touting an easy new way to sign up for an account. “Your account can make your destiny,” the drummer announced. Soon, Sharma had signed up for his first-ever account at a camp run by the State Bank of India in this rural northern village, part of an ambitious government exercise to bring nearly 600 million Indians into the formal banking system by January. Launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the program aims to include the poorest and the most marginalized in India’s economic growth and reverse a recent slide in household savings. Thousands of bankers and banking agents have fanned out across the country to reach people in far-flung villages and city slums. To open an account, reams of identity documents are no longer needed — and money for a deposit isn’t necessary, either. Analysts say it is uncertain whether the new accounts will remain active, because India lacks the network to provide service to so many people. Even so, since August, more than 55 million accounts have been opened with a total of almost $750 million in deposits. “There is a lot of cash-based transactions in India. We want to bring it into the banking system so that the cash becomes productive, the poor get into the habit of small savings and get access to credit,” said Gurdial Singh Sandhu, a secretary in the Ministry of Finance in New Delhi. In the past six years, India’s household savings dropped by 5 percent, he said. According to the World Bank, only 35 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people have bank accounts; the government says the figure is close to 58 percent. About 73 percent of farming families in rural areas have no access to formal sources of credit, according to a 2013 report by the Reserve Bank of India. Many rely on money lenders or informal women’s groups for small loans. There are 115,000 bank branches in India, up from 60,000 a decade ago. But vast swaths of hinterland have none. In the past 15 years, the microfinance industry expanded to bridge the gap to some extent, but the sector gained a bad reputation in recent years because of some agents’ aggressive loan collection practices **.** Some companies also operated Ponzi-like schemes among the urban poor. In an e-mail to bank officers in August, Modi called the account-opening drive “a national priority.” It was “untenable,” he said, for so many Indians to be deprived of basic banking benefits **.** The new accountscome with a debit card, an accident insurance policy worth about $1,600, and a short-term loan of about $100 after a year. Modi’s banking push is not India’s first. Past efforts fizzled because the government did not monitor them, and new accounts remained dormant, Sandhu said.But the freebies, Modi’s personal interest and the target of reaching every home are likely to make this campaign more effective, he said. “Many people are coming in hordes to open accounts because they think government welfare benefits will come their way in the future through these accounts,” said Preeti Mall, a manager at the State Bank of India near Prangarh. But one lingering question is whether the accounts will survive. Unable to build new bank offices quickly, India adopted in 2006 what has come to be called the “branchless banking” model, a system that has seen some success in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya. The banks operate through a network of village “business correspondents” who function sort of like human ATMs. They conduct transactions — such as deposits and withdrawals of small amounts — with a cellphone and computer from corner shops. It has been harder to make the model work in India because banks view business correspondents as unprofitable. “Opening new accounts is an easy thing, but there is no way the country is geared to service these accounts and keep them alive,” said Abhishek Sinha, co-founder of Eko India Financial Services, which works with store owners in 10 states whose businesses double as banks. “Nobody is measuring the activity in these accounts.” If Modi’s program meets its goal of linking every home to a bank account, tens of thousands more business correspondents will need to be hired, up from 200,000 today. In the village of Girdharpur, business correspondent and store owner Rakesh Kumar complained that banks do not pay him on time. He said that he has helped open 276 bank accounts since September but that villagers have yet to receive their account numbers or debit cards. Amid the push, banks have been opening accounts for almost anyone who shows up at the enrollment camps, without checking to see whether they already have accounts or are opening accounts elsewhere. Belatedly, Sandhu said, banks are surveying households to check for account duplication. As for Sharma, the milk-seller, he said he sees hope — and an opportunity to expand his business. “Whenever I needed extra cash, my mother went to a neighbor and asked,” Sharma said. “If I can get a loan with dignity from a bank, I will buy another cow.”

Bank deposits rise in Washington area

Washington area residents are keeping more money in the bank as looming government budget cuts add to economic uncertainty. Deposits at Washington area banks rose to $157.2 billion, a 10.5 percent increase over last year, according to data released last week by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The data mirror a national trend in which Americans are saving more money even as interest rates hit record lows. The total amount of money in savings accounts rose about 5 percent to $6.9 trillion earlier this year, according to data released by the Federal Reserve. Bert Ely, a banking expert based in Alexandria, said the increase in savings doesn’t necessarily mean Americans are better off now than they were last year. “I think a lot of it is that people are getting more liquid, even as household net worth has declined,” Ely said. “Maybe they’re taking money out of the stock market or they’re selling assets.” Capital One, which reported $28.77 billion in deposits as of June 30, ranked first in the Washington area following its $9 billion purchase of ING Direct in February. The McLean-based bank, which has 205 local branches, held 18.3 percent of the area’s deposits. Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, posted $21.76 billion in deposits and accounted for 13.8 percent of market share. Bank of America ($20.23 billion in deposits), SunTrust Bank ($16.42 billion) and BB&T ($13.15 billion) all maintained a strong footing in the region. The growth in the Washington area outpaced the nation, where deposits rose about 8 percent to $8.95 trillion. Some analysts attributed the increase to consumers putting off big-ticket purchases for fear the economy could suddenly turn sour. “People are not spending money,” said Lew Sosnowik, a banking analyst at Koonce Securities in Bethesda. “Instead of buying that refrigerator, they’re putting their money in the bank.” Meanwhile, the number of branches in the area fell for the first time in eight years as banks looked to cut costs by consolidating locations. There were 11 fewer branches in the metropolitan area this year than there were last year, with 1,761 branches in the District, its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and Jefferson County in West Virginia. Bethesda-based Eagle Bank, which logged the region’s 10th largest share of deposits, was the highest-ranking community bank on the list. Deposits at the bank rose 29 percent in the past year to total $2.52 billion. “I really think it’s due to the strength of our local economy,” said Michael T. Flynn, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the bank’s holding company. “Deposits are really just a reflection of the cash that’s flowing through the system here.”

United Bankshares to buy Bank of Georgetown, creating area’s largest community bank

United Bankshares this week announced it is buying Bank of Georgetown for an estimated $269 million, more than doubling its presence in the District and creating the area’s largest community bank. The all-stock deal, announced Monday, would give United $8.5 billion in local assets and $5.4 billion in local deposits. It would also give United a stronghold within the District, which has become an increasingly attractive market for area banks. In the past, many community banks shied away from the District, choosing instead to focus their expansion efforts in Northern Virginia or suburban Maryland, said Bert Ely, a financial consultant based in Alexandria. But that is changing as well-heeled residents move into the District. “For a long time, the District was seen as not-the-best banking market,” Ely said. “But that perception is rapidly changing. That’s why Bank of Georgetown was able to grow as it did and to prosper as it did.” Within the District, Bank of Georgetown has six branches that handle $553 million in deposits, according to recent data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. United Bank, meanwhile, has four branches with about $486 million in deposits. “There’s going to be a nice customer Rolodex that comes with this,” said Matthew Schultheis, an analyst for Boenning & Scattergood, a Philadelphia-based investment firm. “It certainly gets United more presence in a market they obviously want to be in.” United, which splits its headquarters between Washington and Charleston, W.V., has been aggressively buying up local banks. Most recently, it completed a $467.39 million purchase of Virginia Commerce Bank in 2014. Prior deals include the acquisition of Winchester-based Premier Community Bankshares for $200.06 million and Bethesda-based Sequoia Bancshares for $112.18 million. United recently posted a record $35 million in third-quarter profits. “This deal takes us to the next level,” said Ross Draber, United Bankshares’ chief operating officer. “This is a great fit culturally, and it enhances our position here in metro D.C. and throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.” Draber said the bank had yet to determine which branches it would combine and shutter. United has nearly 40 Washington area branches, while Bank of Georgetown has 11. The deal, which is awaiting approval from regulators and Bank of Georgetown shareholders, is slated to close in mid-2016.

Two D.C. banking heavyweights are retiring at the end of the year

Robert Pincus got his start at the now-defunct D.C. National Bancorp in the early 1970s, became its chief executive at age 33 and went on to be vice chair of Bethesda-based EagleBank, the area’s largest community bank. Michael Harreld stumbled into banking around the same time. He took a job as a lawyer at Citizens Fidelity Bank in his hometown of Louisville, and worked his way up to become its chief executive. He oversaw the bank’s sale to PNC, and for the past 11 years has headed the Pittsburgh-based bank’s operations in the Washington region. Now, after more than four decades in banking, both Pincus and Harreld have come to the same conclusion: It’s time to retire at the end of this year. “I said, ‘I’m 72 years old and it’s time to live,’ ” Harreld said. “It’s time to relax and not think about budgets or human resources issues or any of those other things I’ve been doing every day for 48 years.” Pincus, who declined to give his age, said he had been mulling retirement for a while. But when his brother died in May, his plans took on a newfound urgency. “I have worked my entire career from 8:30 in the morning to 9 at night,” he said. “I just felt it was time to get out and do something different — diversify my life a little bit, if you will.” During their careers, the two banking heavyweights say they have seen the industry evolve multiple times. The number of banks in the Washington region has declined steadily in recent years, even as wealth has skyrocketed. Technology, new regulations and cybersecurity concerns have also changed much of the day-to-day nature of banking, they say. “There has been a complete change in dynamics,” said Harreld, who will remain an adviser to the chairman. “People have access to all of their information 24/7 now. That’s very different from when you used to have to wait for your checking account statement to come in the mail, or when you had passbooks savings 40 years ago.” As a result, he said, he spends more time than ever meeting with clients, whether in person or via Skype. Customers are more informed now than in the past, he said, which means they want to be more hands-on in managing their money. Washington’s business landscape also is changing, said Pincus, who financed José Andrés’s Washington restaurants, and counts developer Chip Akridge and the D.C. government as clients. The scene is less influenced than it once was by mom-and-pop retailers and locally owned banks, law firms and medical practices. There are fewer liquor stores and restaurants like the ones his father owned in Prince George’s County, and more national chains. “Washington is becoming more sophisticated but less entrepreneurial,” said Pincus, who grew up in Hyattsville, Md., attended the University of Maryland and got an MBA from American University. “The locally owned businesses of Washington are shrinking — not unlike the banking community, where the out-of-town banks are acquiring the local banks — and I feel that’s a shame.” Eighty-three area banks currently hold $223.33 billion in local deposits. Twenty years ago, there were 126 banks with $51.69 billion in deposits, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That growth in regional dollars has boded well for PNC and Eagle, which are the region’s sixth- and eighth-largest banks, respectively. PNC, which largely entered the market after buying locally owned Riggs Bank in 2004, holds $12.5 billion in local deposits, while Eagle Bank has $5.4 billion. “Even though there are fewer banks, its become much more competitive than it used to be,” Pincus said. “When banks get healthy, they begin getting very aggressive.” But, he said, it’s time to put all that behind him — at least for now. Next up: A few weeks skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho, then three months at his house in Naples, Fla. After that, he said he will continue to be an “ambassador” for Eagle Bank. Harreld, meanwhile, plans to stay on as an adviser to PNC through June 2018. He will be succeeded by Richard Bynum, currently head of PNC’s banking business nationally. As for him: “My immediate plans?” he asked. “To relax. _An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Robert Pincus is chairman of EagleBank. He is vice chair. This story has been updated._

As customer needs change, local institutions are banking on technology

There is a policy at Capital One Labs in Clarendon that if a team needs more than two pizzas for dinner, the group is probably too big. Staying small has been a top priority for the two-and-a-half-year-old technology incubator, a spinoff of the McLean based financial giant. Unlike its much larger parent company, Capital One Financial, the Labs operates much like a start-up — albeit a well-funded one — in an Arlington office dotted with beanbag chairs, throw pillows and an arcade machine built by employees. Keeping teams small allows Capital One Labs to be nimble and move quickly. The company’s recent mobile wallet was born out of Capital One Labs, as was its recent partnership with Apple Pay. About 50 employees work on a dozen projects at any given time. Across the region, banks and credit unions are reinventing themselves as quasi-technology companies, coming up with new branch prototypes, payment systems and security protocols. With cybersecurity breaches becoming a major concern that costs the industry hundreds of millions of dollars, local executives say the need to keep up with the latest technology has become not only important, but vital. PNC this year opened new “universal branches” in Rosslyn and Tenleytown, where teller lines have been replaced by tablet-toting employees. Wells Fargo, which is experimenting with applications for Google Glass, has taken similar measures, picking the District for its first high-tech locations. Even smaller community banks are taking note: At Eagle Bank in Bethesda, the technology team has quadrupled since the bank’s opening in 1998. “The whole philosophy around technology has changed dramatically in the last 10 years,” said Susan G. Riel, chief operating officer for Eagle Bank. “At one time, banks controlled what technology people used, whether it was ATMs or credit cards. In today’s world, the customers are the ones telling us what they want.” Increasingly, what customers want is easy access from their phones. At Capital One Labs, tucked away on the eighth floor of an office building above a Trader Joe’s, employees clad in jeans and sneakers have spent the better part of 2014 developing the company’s mobile wallet, which offers real-time purchase information and rewards balances, and integrating the bank’s credit and debit cards with Apple Pay, a payment system that allows customers to pay for purchases using their iPhones and Apple Watches. Capital One created the Labs spinoff in early 2011 and opened its Arlington location a year later. (There are also offices in San Francisco and in New York.) The idea, executives said, is to create an in-house incubator for new technology that can be fed directly to the parent company. “At Capital One, we’re embedding technology, data and software development deeply into our business model and how we work,” Richard D. Fairbank, founder, chairman and chief executive of the company said in a call with investors two weeks ago. “Banking inherently is a digital product, and digital will transform banking over time.” In 2012, Capital One paid $9 billion for online bank ING Direct as part of its efforts to beef up its Internet presence. The company continues to add engineers, product developers, designers and data scientists, and earlier this month, it acquired Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm. “The momentum around digital is building across financial services,” Fairbank said. “Ultimately, the winners in banking will have the capability of a world-class software company.” Need a credit card? Well, Navy Federal Credit Union has an app for that. Two and a half years ago, the Vienna-based credit union scrapped its third-party mobile apps and decided to start anew. It moved its mobile technology team in-house and began designing what its customers seemed to be looking for: Apps that would allow them to apply for credit and debit cards, redeem cash rewards and see real-time updates using their phones and tablets. It seems to be working: More than 30 percent of the credit union’s members now use its mobile apps on a monthly basis, with the average person logging into their account 19 times each month. “Mobile has become the easiest way to interact with us,” said Randy Hopper, vice president of credit cards for Navy Federal Credit Union. “The results have been pretty astronomical.” At Bank of Georgetown, which began offering mobile banking earlier this year, much of the company’s technology operations are handled by third-party contractors, a necessity for a bank of its size with about $1 billion in assets, executives said. “It’s the only way we can compete with the big guys,” said Domingo Rodriguez, chief financial officer and executive vice president for the District-based bank. “Emphasis number one is on data security. It’s our house and we want to protect it the best we can.” About 5 percent of the company’s gross revenue goes toward technology, he said, adding that cybersecurity has become one of the bank’s most pressing concerns in recent years given the number of high-profile data breaches, most recently at JPMorgan Chase. Last year’s data breach at Target cost American banks and credit unions more than $200 million, according to the Consumer Bankers Association and the Credit Union National Association. “In today’s world, everyone is getting attacked,” said Riel of Eagle Bank, adding that while Eagle has not had a data breach, it has been attacked. Eagle Bank is in the process of allowing business customers to approve wire transfers using mobile devices. The technology is easily accessible, Riel said, but the challenge is making sure that the transactions are secure. “It’s a scary time, but technology continues to advance,” she said. “The security is improving also — it’s just a matter of keeping up with that.” There are two types of customers, said Wayne Fortune, manager of PNC Bank’s Tenleytown branch: Those who balance their checkbooks, and those who don’t. The first group tends to visit the bank regularly to deposit checks or withdraw cash. The latter relies on apps, real-time alerts and mobile statements to keep track of their finances. “They are polar opposites, and we have to be able to accommodate both,” Fortune said. To that end, the branch — which dates back to 1958 when it was part of Riggs Bank — reopened in late September after more than a year of renovations. The space was gutted. Teller lines, glass barriers and offices were replaced with stations outfitted with iPads and computers where customers can check balances and deposit checks. The branch has six employees, all of whom are trained to help customers with everything from deposits to loan applications. They walk around and offer help. A corner office is reserved for meeting with business banking and wealth management clients. “The banking industry sees value in moving toward a more universal style,” Fortune said. “We don’t have tellers and bankers. Everybody is cross-trained to do everything.” A souped-up ATM at the front of the store is also equipped for multitasking. In addition to traditional withdrawals, customers can deposit up to 50 bills of currency and 30 paper checks at a time. That machine alone has helped cut back on costs, Fortune said. Employees used to have to unlock ATMs every evening to empty envelopes, count bills and match checks. Now much of that is done digitally and in real-time. Workers tend to the machine once a week instead of every night. “As customers visit branches less to conduct a transaction and more to get advice, that requires us to rethink the layout, the format and how we manage our branches,” said Thomas S. Kunz, director of digital for PNC. That shift also means banks have been steadily shuttering physical locations in recent years to cut costs. As of June 30, there were 1,717 bank branches in the Washington area, 3.5 percent less than there were four years ago, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Wells Fargo, however, has added 11 branches since 2010 as the San Francisco-based bank has shifted its focus toward smaller, high-tech branches in urban neighborhoods such as NoMa and the U Street Corridor. The company’s newest locations use touch-screens instead of deposit slips. Going digital has helped cut costs and made operations more efficient — there are fewer documents to sort and shred at the end of the day — and has also helped cut down on back-office storage space. “If you look at the banking industry broadly, there’s still a lot of paper that drives that business,” said Jonathan G. Velline, executive vice president for ATM banking and store strategy at Wells Fargo. “For us, we know that is inefficient and we also know that our customers don’t want to fill out all of that paperwork. They expect the immediate gratification they’ve come to expect from Amazon or Google or Samsung.” The company’s new stores devote about 10 percent of their overall footprint to storing documents, compared to 40 percent for a traditional branch, Velline said. For community banks, the shift toward smaller — and fewer — branches has an added benefit: Being able to reach a broader swath of customers without spending large amounts of money on new real estate. At Eagle Bank, for example, an increasing number of the bank’s customers live outside of Washington. The ability to check account balances and bank activity with the tap of a button has been transformative, Riel said. “We always say we listen to our customers, but with technology, we really have to,” she said. “They’re the ones driving change, not us. **More from Capital Business:** For a daily rundown of Washington area business news, sign up for the “CapBiz A.M.” e-mail newsletter.

Six neighborhoods where a good house deal is still attainable

Intense bidding wars, along with high demand and historically low inventory, are driving the Washington area’s real estate market this spring, experts say, leaving many buyers with the impression that the ideal house in the ideal neighborhood is simply out of reach. The market has presented them with difficult trade-offs to consider: Buying in a high-demand community may mean paying so much for the house that they have little left for much else. Or buying a house they can afford may mean settling for a less desirable neighborhood with longer commutes to work, iffy schools and few amenities. Many house hunters, particularly first-timers, simply give up. The Washington Post set out to find some communities where buyers have managed to level the playing field in this fierce seller’s market. We asked data firm RealEstate Business Intelligence (RBI), a subsidiary of Rockville-based MRIS, to help us identify communities where buyers have a better chance of negotiating down the list price on a non-distressed house. They identified these six: Foggy Bottom and Cathedral Heights in the District; Capitol Heights and Silver Spring in Maryland; and Lovettsville and Great Falls in Virginia. Our criteria were to find communities with rising home sales and decreasing days on the market, two key indicators of growing demand. In consultation with RBI, we determined that neighborhoods where houses sell at 95 percent or more of list price are weighted in the seller’s favor. On the other hand, houses that sold at less than 90 percent of list prices were, for the most part, not in areas that are experiencing significant demand. So our sweet spot was popular neighborhoods where houses sold in the 90 to 94 percent range of list price (although Great Falls fell outside that). “We looked at seller concessions where home buyers got the greatest discounts off the asking price,” said Jonathan Hill, president of RBI. Inventory in the six communities is low, just like elsewhere in the region. But unlike many other parts of metropolitan Washington, the number of distressed properties in the six communities has dropped to next to nothing, Hill said, and so homeowners there may be more willing to list their houses. For instance, foreclosures in Capitol Heights dropped from a peak of 39 in January 2010 to zero in the past few months. And Great Falls has only had five short sales since June 2010. Maybe the sellers are “not getting what they hope to get, but if you get 94 percent or 90 percent [of the asking price] that appears to be enough to get them to ratify a contact,” Hill added. **Carisa C. Chappell** is a freelance writer. **D.C.-area neighborhoods where it’s still possible to get a good deal** For more information on the neighborhoods, click on the link underneath each neighborhood. **THE DISTRICT** **20037: Foggy Bottom/West End ** Days on market: 66 in 2011; 45 in 2012 Median sale price: $505,000 in 2011; $482,500 in 2012 (down 4.5 percent) Sales: 195 in 2011; 210 in 2012 (up 7.7 percent) Sales price ratio of original list price: 93.9 percent **20016: Cathedral Heights/American University Park ** ****Days on market: 34 in 2011 and 2012 Median sale price: $770,500 in 2011; $727,500 in 2012 (down 5.6 percent) Sales: 412 in 2011 and 474 in 2012 (up 15 percent) Sale price ratio of original list price: 95.8 percent **MARYLAND** **20743: Capitol Heights ** Days on market: 74 in 2011 and 50 in 2012 Median sale price: $78,750 in 2011; $89,900 in 2012 (up 14.2 percent) Sales: 443 in 2011 and 536 in 2012 (up 21 percent) Sale price ratio of original list price: 90.5 percent **20906: Silver Spring ** Days on market: 61 in 2011 and 37 in 2012 Median sale price: $205,000 in 2011; $219,000 in 2012 (up 6.8 percent) Sales: 795 in 2011 and 818 in 2012 (up 3 percent) Sale price ratio of original list price: 93.4 percent **VIRGINIA** **20180: Lovettsville ** Days on market: 72 in 2011; 57 in 2012 Median sale price: $334,102 in 2011; $345,000 in 2012 (up 3.3 percent) Sales: 80 in 2011 and 117 in 2012 (up 46 percent) Sale price ratio of original list: 92.9 percent **22066: Great Falls ** Days on market: 73 in 2011 and 62 in 2012 Median sale price: $1.010 million in 2011; $961,250 in 2012 (down 4.8 percent) Sales: 195 in 2011 and 210 in 2012 (up 8 percent) Sale price ratio of original list price: 93.1 percent _Source: RealEstate Business Intelligence and MRIS_

Behind the career: Jeff Wood

**Position:** Greater Washington market president of Bank of America. _As a child, it was Jeff Wood’s dream to fly planes. When he entered the military, he became a flight officer and commander in the Navy. Looking to anchor down, he went to graduate school and when he left the service began working for Merrill Lynch as a financial adviser. He quickly built a large clientele, and began climbing the corporate ladder, until becoming managing director for the Washington area, after Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch._ _You once were a director in the Detroit area, at a time when the business there was hit by a tough economy. How did you approach that situation? ****_ The advantage I had there was that I dropped into a situation with a fresh perspective. The economy up there was so depressed and so challenging. [Staff there asked] who’s this guy that jumped in here and said ‘Hey, there’s a lot of opportunity’? Having an overwhelming contra approach, the inspiration can be infectious. It’s about having the overwhelming positive attitude in a very tough environment. _What actions did you take? ****_ We took our community volunteers and went out into the community and made a positive influence. We worked with homeless and domestic abuse shelters. I got that team to work together and change the community’s opinion about our organization. People there were getting laid off. Well, if that’s what’s happening, how can we help? That’s where we came in from an advisory and wealth management standpoint. We helped them with their IRAs or 401(k)s. We had a tremendously robust business helping people with their retirement questions because they had to take early retirement. We tried to partner with local business and see how we could get out and be on the front foot in our community. When you’re doing right by the community, good things will come to you and that’s what happened in the Detroit community. _You had some influential mentors. What was an important piece of advice you received? ****_ Maybe one of the reasons why I was an early adopter in the integration of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is because a mentor once said to me, ‘Everyone loves progress, but no one likes change.’ You cannot have progress without change. As a leader, you have to be that change agent. As a result, I’ve always looked at the opportunity to be on the front of that change. _What were some leadership lessons you learned from that integration? ****_ How smart most of the people I found in this company are. Once you got to know them personally, you really got to understand how good they are at what they do. The leadership lesson would be just go out and get people to talk and interact quickly. _How did you do that? ****_ I had to facilitate meetings between a commercial banker and a wealth management adviser, a U.S. trust professional and the commercial lending arm. Making all of those connections internally and being out in front and pushing and pulling that interaction to happen, that’s the progress and momentum. Recognize the opportunity quickly, take decisive action. If you know it’ll be best for your client, you can’t go wrong. _What business books are you reading? ****_ I’m a big self-help guy. I’m reading “Lincoln On Leadership” [by Donald T. Phillips]. I recently saw the movie and he had this policy of bringing different types of diverse people together. **_— Interview with Vanessa Small_ **

Southeast man is charged with robbing several District banks last month

D.C. police arrested a 20-year-old man Tuesday on charges he robbed four banks in June, including three in one day, officials said in a statement. Authorities arrested Maurice Douglas, of Southeast Washington Tuesday morning on a U.S. District Court warrant that charged him with a robbery spree that began on June 6 and ended on June 20, police said. In the first robbery, a man walked into the PNC branch in the 2000 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Ave SE. He then handed a teller a note demanding cash and left shortly before 1 p.m. with an undisclosed amount of money. Two weeks later, a man who fit the same description robbed or tried to rob three banks in the same day, beginning with the Wells Fargo in the 3200 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. He fled the scene without any cash. About four hours later, he tried to rob another Wells Fargo branch in the 1200 block of First Street NE, but was unsuccessful. Five minutes later, he walked into the TD Bank in the same block, passed another note and left the building with an undisclosed amount of money, police said. Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail

Shopping for new locations in Tenleytown

Regarding the June 6 Metro article “Georgetown Day buying Tenleytown properties”: Congratulations to Georgetown Day School for its purchase of the Safeway property at Davenport and 42nd streets in Tenleytown. Congratulations to Safeway for warding off a protracted battle with neighbors over renovating its property and for saving its time and money rather than engaging in the same sort of battle as the 10-year-old debacle involving a Giant Food store in Cleveland Park. And congratulations to Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3E for effectively closing down a convenient, competitive grocery store that served the neighborhood well and that I have frequented for 33 years. Now neighborhood residents can drive to shop for groceries in Chevy Chase, Georgetown or Van Ness. Way to go, ANC3E! ****Carol Warner,** Washington**

Switzerland, threatened by isolation, lifting veil on secret bank accounts

For decades, Switzerland was the place where money went to hide. Cash sent to its mountain aeries was protected by some of the strictest secrecy laws in the world. But with the euro crisis forcing Switzerland’s revenue-starved neighbors to search out new sources of money, the Alpine country’s bank vaults are suddenly looking irresistible. In recent months, the nation’s strict banking secrecy has been under assault from countries such as Germany and Britain as never before. Experts say the last veils may soon be dropped altogether, bringing the hush-hush tradition to an end. Last week, the council that serves as Switzerland’s executive branch met to discuss new steps toward banking transparency after having been threatened with painful isolation if it did not agree to changes. This month, the upper house of Germany’s Parliament is set to vote on a treaty with Switzerland that would require the banking stronghold to withhold taxes from the accounts of German residents. Similar deals have been signed recently with Austria and Britain, and the possibility is being discussed with others. The United States has also been cracking down on international tax evasion since 2009 and has extracted punishing damages from Swiss banks that were found to have helped Americans escape the Internal Revenue Service. Many in Switzerland’s banking capitals have resigned themselves to handing over their ledger books to international tax authorities sooner or later. In the hushed, marble-lined hallways of grand banks in Zurich and Geneva, the whispers are of a future when the country no longer serves as a hub for tax evasion. “You can hardly understate what is happening,” said Luc Thevenoz, director of the Center for Banking and Financial Law at the University of Geneva. “Switzerland has created this image that the big value that Swiss bankers brought their clients was secrecy. It was an attractive proposition, especially with regard to tax issues.” No one is sure quite how much Switzerland’s private wealth management sector depends on tax evasion. Bankers’ estimates of deposits from private individuals range from 30 percent on the low end to 60 percent or more. Many say that a significant portion of those funds will drain away from Swiss coffers. Even the measures already taken could put pressure on the Swiss economy, which is heavily dependent on profits from the financial sector. Some economists forecast a loss of 10,000 jobs and a full percentage point off the country’s gross domestic product. In recent weeks, banking giants such as UBS and Credit Suisse have cited the impending changes as one source of their lackluster third-quarter profits. But they also say that they can make up the outflow of European and American money with new deposits from developing countries, especially in Asia, where citizens might not be evading taxes but are simply seeking a safe place to stash their money. Overall, deposits in Swiss banks have increased in the past year even as Western European money has been withdrawn, according to Switzerland’s central bank. “This untaxed money was very profitable for the banks,” said Peter Kurer, a former chairman of UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank. “This is combined with a situation where generally it’s getting more and more difficult to make profits. The margins will go down, and you have to be more efficient.” Last week, UBS announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs, most of them from the investment banking side of its business, a measure not directly related to the changes in secrecy rules. The chief executive of UBS, Sergio Ermotti, recently broke a long-standing taboo in Switzerland when he told a local newspaper that the country ought to do away with banking secrecy altogether. He estimated that his bank held between $13 billion and $32 billion in untaxed deposits. Many experts say it is only a matter of time before international standards are in place that would automatically hand over full information about depositors to other countries’ tax authorities. That would be the death knell for secrecy in Switzerland, an old tradition that was codified in 1934, making it a criminal offense for any bank employee to divulge information about a client’s accounts except in the case of the gravest crimes — a category that did not include tax evasion. But even harder for this nation’s 8 million residents to accept is that the changes could hit deeply at their cherished, fiercely independent self-image. “Banking secrecy has been associated here with basic Swiss values, like neutrality and discretion,” said Mark Herkenrath, a sociologist at the University of Zurich who works on tax equality issues. “People were shocked” when Switzerland was briefly placed on the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s gray list of tax havens in 2009. Swiss citizens started to realize that tax evasion, not chocolate and fine watches, was defining them internationally. The tax issues have put stress on Switzerland’s relations with its European neighbors, and some authorities have made a habit of purchasing stolen Swiss banking data to track down their own tax evaders. One German state, North Rhine-Westphalia, has raided the homes of bank clients whom it identified through stolen CDs of information. In Greece, a thumb drive of Swiss banking records has threatened to split apart the government, which has not decided whether to act on the information. A Greek journalist was arrested, tried and acquitted last week after he published some names contained in the records. The United States has imposed far-reaching restrictions on banks that do business with U.S. clients abroad, inspired in part by revelations of wide- ranging efforts by Swiss banks to help Americans evade taxes. With penalties of up to 30 percent on foreign banks’ U.S.-based profits if the banks fail to hand over the foreign data of even a single U.S. account-holder, many Swiss banks are giving up on Americans altogether. They reason that there is not enough demand to justify the risks. “Following the big crisis there is a regulation tsunami,” said Hans Kaufmann, a member of the far-right Swiss People’s Party. An expert on banking issues, he has fought to preserve secrecy. The forces arrayed against him are searching for illusory revenue, he said. “If they do not get what they had in their fantasy, they always come back and say, ‘There must be more money in Switzerland.’ ” Switzerland has been trying to reach agreements with individual countries rather than be forced into full-scale transparency. The treaties with Britain and Austria would hand over a chunk of investment income to tax authorities in those countries while preserving depositors’ anonymity. Countries signing the agreements “only have to open their hands and money comes,” said Mario Tuor, a spokesman for the Swiss State Secretariat for International Financial Matters, the main office that is handling tax negotiations. The same arrangement is under discussion with Germany, which believes that its residents have hidden away about $200 million in Swiss banks. Leaders of Germany’s main opposition party, the Social Democrats, have threatened to veto the treaty when it comes to a vote in the upper house of Parliament in late November because they say it is too lenient on tax cheats. The debate has some Swiss residents eager to find a resolution — one that would result in other countries backing away. “Switzerland does not want to be under pressure from foreign governments,” said Christine Hirszowicz, an emeritus professor of banking at the University of Zurich. “Switzerland is a small country. Its independence is all it has.”

Back-to-school tips

The start of school is just days away. Is it too late to prepare your child, no matter the age? Nope. Here are some tips from people in the know about how to help ease that transition for your kids, their teachers and you. **** **Get them comfortable** _**Tempe Thomas** , a preschool teacher for 28 years at Chevy Chase Presbyterian Weekday Nursery School:_ **1.** Parents, please don’t talk about the new school/class/teacher your child will have too far in advance because preschoolers do not have any concept of time. They live in the present. Talking about school too soon only causes anxieties and stress. **2.** Try to arrange for some of the new classmates to “happen” to be at the same park/playground. But don’t say they’ll be new friends. Have the children play in the same area of the park/playground. It’s best not to force friendships. **3.** About two weeks before school starts, be sure to reinforce leaving and returning. When you leave your preschooler to go to work or to run errands, say goodbye and say you’ll be back. When you come back be sure to state the obvious: “See? I came back.” Do this each time, so that your child knows that yes, you’re going to disappear, but you _will_ be back. . . . **4.** And when school starts, drop off quickly. . . .The message the child gets when the parent says goodbye but then lingers and repeats, “I’m leaving now, bye, you’ll be fine, I love you, bye, I’m going now” [is that] you don’t think they can handle school without a parent there. So instead, tell your child goodbye, tell him/her “I know you’ll have a good time” and that you’ll be back to pick him or her up. . . . Parents need to feel they can trust the teacher to care for and about their preschooler as much as they do. . . . Preschool teachers know how to get children interested in a book, puzzle, painting or other activity. If your preschooler cries, remember that the curriculum in the beginning of the year concentrates on making preschoolers comfortable in class. **** **Get organized (together)** _**Rachel Strisik** , a professional organizer with Rachel and Company: _ Involve your children with all the back-to-school organizing that you are trying to set up. Back-to-school is the best time for starting anew, and a way to ensure that it works for everyone is to help the kids create the systems. For example, with Ellie and Marin (my 61 / 2-year-olds), we are working together to set up where their backpacks and shoes will go when they come into the house. They are helping me put together what they will need in their homework station so they can feel ownership and pride, as well as a sense of accomplishment. This will hopefully make them want to keep it up once the school year starts. I am also letting them pick out the container that will be used at our kitchen table when they do their homework. And we are discussing what goes inside. A similar way of doing things with older children works, too. Have them help put a calendar together for the family and write out their schedule of activities, for example. That helps them feel in control of their own lives. **Get them socially prepared** _**Denise Daniels** , child development expert:_ Parents should make sure to go over important safety measures with their children such as standing away from the curb at the bus stop, always wearing a helmet when riding a bicycle to school and walking on the sidewalk to and from school. . . . Nowadays there’s another back-to-school safety tip that parents need to include in their discussions with children: What to do if a bully confronts you? **1.** Try to recognize when someone looks mad or angry. **2.** If bullies confront you, ignore them and don’t give them any attention; that’s just what they want. **3.** Speak up. Tell a caring adult such as a teacher, parent, bus driver or playground supervisor. Once an adult is involved, the bully usually stops out of fear that his or her parents will find out. Standing up for oneself is an invaluable life lesson for kids. **Get them on a schedule** _**Beverly Samuels** , who taught fourth and fifth grades at Marumsco Hills Elementary in Woodbridge for 25 years and is now a reading specialist for all grade levels:_ The best thing a parent can do is start to get kids back on a schedule. Say to them: “This is the time where we read together, talk together, go to bed, turn the TV off.” [This advice is important for all students and families], but being a Title 1 school, we have a lot of children living in poverty. Parents are not at home; they are working, trying to make ends meet. So the kids come into school and fall asleep because they didn’t get to bed until 1 or 2 a.m. They haven’t eaten breakfast. They are tired, and you can’t learn like that. It’s not about buying crayons and pencils. It’s about getting them ready for nutrition and exercise and sleep, and getting the mind ready for school. **More from The Washington Post:** School lunches get an upgrade Back to school, with a food reboot More back to school coverage More On Parenting coverage Five ways to help your middle-school student get organized Let your middle schooler be risky

Hundreds say goodbye to Central High student

Charoscar Coleman, the principal of Central High School in Prince George’s County, hoped his words at the funeral of one of his students could motivate the rest of them to achieve their goals. “Marckel will live on through your accomplishments,” Coleman told hundreds of mourners who gathered to remember Marckel Norman Ross, a junior who was shot and killed last week as he walked to school. “Take full advantage of your life,” he said. “Don’t take your life for granted.” Brenda Allen, the eulogist and minister at Jericho City of Praise, offered comfort to the family and implored residents in crime-ridden neighborhoods to look after one another. And Markies Ross said goodbye in a poem that he wrote for the brother he called “Kellz.” “So many things I never got to say. I never imagined you’d leave us this way,” Markies Ross said as he stood above his brother’s flag-draped silver coffin. “I miss you with all my heart. I wish we never had to part. I know you’re always by my side, so now I guess this is goodbye.” Ross — known for his infectious smile and his love of dance, modeling and making people laugh — was killed Sept. 11 during his morning commute to the school in Capitol Heights. Police have made no arrests in the case. He is the second Prince George’s high-school student to be killed since school began last month. Amber Stanley, 17, a senior at Charles H. Flowers High School, was slain in her bedroom at her family’s Kettering home on Aug. 22. Police have said they do not think the crimes are linked. Ross’s funeral drew about 500 attendees, including elected officials, community activists, school faculty members and hundreds of his Central High classmates. Young men in black suits and ties wore buttons on their lapels with pictures of Ross and “Rest On Kellz” written underneath. “He was a good guy,” said Manasseh Bailey, a freshman at Central High. “I never saw a frown on his face. We always did everything together. He was like my best friend.” Many students from Central High participated in the program. During the viewing, two members of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps stood at attention holding flags at each end of the casket, where Ross lay wearing his JROTC uniform. A member of his class, Edith Rollins, sang a song. Another, Taylor Dodson, read a poem. “My heart goes out to them,” said Board of Education member Carolyn M. Boston (District 6), who represents the area. “It’s hard on them. Not just on the family, but the entire community. . . . We have to do something about losing our kids like this. We have to come together as a community.”

Bram Goldsmith, who helped make City National Bank a force in finance, dies

Bram Goldsmith, the “Banker to the Stars” who expanded City National Bank’s assets more than fivefold during two decades at its helm, died Feb. 28 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 93. The Los Angeles-based bank did not provide a specific cause. Mr. Goldsmith served as chairman and chief executive of City National Bank from 1975 to 1995, expanding its assets to $3.2 billion from $600 million. He continued to serve as chairman of City National Corp., now a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada, until 2013. The bank has a history of supporting the entertainment industry, funding about 50 movies a year. In 1963, Frank Sinatra borrowed money to pay a ransom to his son’s kidnappers. The bank also loaned Arnold Schwarzenegger $4.5 million to help fund his first California gubernatorial campaign in 2003. Other clients have included Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, filmmaker Steven Spielberg and chef Wolfgang Puck. A Newsweek profile in 1985 called Mr. Goldsmith the “Banker to the Stars.” Bram Goldsmith was born in Chicago on Feb. 22, 1923. He attended the University of Illinois, where he studied finance and business administration. In 1942, he joined the Army and served in Burma during World War II. He moved to Southern California in 1952 and founded Buckeye Realty and Management, which built homes in the Los Angeles suburbs. Later, he constructed office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard and the City National Bank building in downtown Los Angeles. His father-in-law, Ben Maltz, was among the original investors in City National Bank, which opened its doors in 1954. Mr. Goldsmith replaced Maltz on the board a decade later. Under Mr. Goldsmith, the bank opened branches in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. He pioneered one of the nation’s first ATM networks. The institution concentrated on lending to small- and mid-size businesses, real estate companies, and professional-service firms tied to the entertainment industry. The bank’s rapid growth in the 1980s was followed by Southern California’s real estate crash in the early 1990s. It recovered and, by the time of Mr. Goldsmith’s retirement, was the largest independent commercial bank in Southern California, U.S. Banker reported in 1996. In November, Royal Bank of Canada acquired City National Corp. for $5 billion. It was the Toronto-based lender’s biggest takeover. Today, City National Bank has more than $36 billion in assets and 75 offices in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, Nevada, New York, Nashville and Atlanta. From 1981 to 1987, Mr. Goldsmith served as a board member of the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He also raised money for Jewish organizations. Mr. Goldsmith lived in Beverly Hills with his wife of more than 70 years, the former Elaine Maltz, a sculptor. They had two sons, Russell and Bruce, and five grandchildren. ** — Bloomberg News  ** Read more **Washington Post obituaries **:

In parting letter, Obama asks Congress one last time to shutter Guantanamo

On his last day in office, President Obama repeated an eight-year request to Congress: Close the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “There is simply no justification beyond politics for the Congress’ insistence on keeping the facility open,” Obama wrote in a letter to Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan that was released by the White House on Thursday. “Members of Congress who obstruct efforts to close the facility, given the stakes involved for our security, have abdicated their responsibility to the American people.” In his first inaugural address in 2009, Obama said that the detention center would shutter during his tenure. He has long said the facility “undermines national security” by serving as a source of propaganda for terrorists and a drain on military resources. Now that Obama is leaving, the prison remains open for an incoming president who has vowed to continue using it. During his campaign, Donald Trump said that he would fill the facility with some “bad dudes,” and he even suggested trying U.S. citizens there, which is prohibited under U.S. law. The last time the United States added to the prison population at Guantanamo was before Obama took office. Opened in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hold captured terrorism suspects, Guantanamo reached a peak population of more than 700 detainees during George W. Bush’s administration. Under President Obama, roughly 196 of them have been resettled or relocated. Now, according to Obama’s letter, only 41 remain. In December, the White House told Congress that it would transfer 19 detainees before Obama left office. Earlier this week, the Pentagon said it was moving a portion of those to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Despite Obama’s attempt to whittle down the population at the prison, a core group of detainees remain. Those include some prisoners whom officials say they cannot release because of security risks but who also cannot be tried because the government does not have enough evidence. The group includes self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose trials likely won’t end for another three years. Obama has argued that Republicans stopped him from shutting down the facility, while his critics say the president could have done more. In 2015, the Obama administration lobbied to move prisoners from Guantanamo to facilities in the United States in order to close the prison once and for all. The proposal garnered swift backlash from Republicans and tighter restrictions for prisoner resettlement. “History will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to bring it to a responsible end,” Obama wrote. “Guantanamo is contrary to our values and undermines our standing in the world, and it is long past time to end this chapter in our history.”

The GOP’s family feud over the Export-Import Bank — in 4 factions

A relatively obscure federal agency is increasingly becoming the scene of a proxy battle within the Republican party over the free market. The Export-Import bank, which guarantees loans for U.S. businesses that want to do risky-ish business abroad, is currently closed after Congress let its June 30 reauthorization date pass without doing anything. The bank's temporary closure is a win for tea-party conservatives, who are now fighting to keep it shuttered. It's the first step to ending "crony capitalism," they say. The bank's supporters argue that the independent agency is necessary for U.S. business to compete abroad. Supporters won a vote in the Senate on Sunday to reopen the self-sustaining bank. But its fate in the House of Representatives is uncertain -- the bank's reauthorization isn't even set for a vote in the House.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Republicans turn on one another in Export-Import Bank battle_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Sunday's vote split the Republican party almost right down the middle. As the bank becomes the latest litmus test for conservatives, it's splintering the party even further. Given the level of nuance in this debate, we thought we would break it down for you. Here are four factions Republicans fall into on the Export-Import Bank: When the bank was last reauthorized in 2012, it was not nearly as controversial. Back then, a solid majority of House Republicans supported keeping the 81-year-old institution going, joining all House Democrats in a yes vote of 330 to 93. Among those 93 House Republicans who opposed the bank was a growing group of hard-core opponents who viewed its demise as one of the first steps toward ending the federal government's involvement in the private sector. [ _The Export-Import Bank explained for those who don't know what that is_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico They included fiscal conservative leaders such as Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), who chairs the powerful House Financial Services Committee, and Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.), who chairs the large conservative coalition the Republican Study Committee. **Key talking point** : “If you’re going to start cutting the weeds out of the federal government, this is one of the first weeds you need to root out," Flores said.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This time around, Republican opponents of the bank have a lot more friends — as in, nearly every GOP 2016 presidential candidate. These new opponents join with what The Washington Post's Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger describe as a fierce lobbying campaign by tea party-aligned groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth and mega-GOP donors Charles and David Koch to get rid of the bank.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Inside the GOP fight over the influential Export-Import Bank_]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico All that lobbying seems to have moved the Republican party to the right by making the bank a litmus test for conservative support in 2016. For example, former Florida governor Jeb Bush was affiliated with a Florida company that received $74 million in loan guarantees from the bank to sell a water pump in Nigeria. Now, he's against it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This camp includes three of the four senators running for president, as well as most governors in the race: Bush, Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal and former Texas governor Rick Perry. **Key talking point:** "I am willing to use any and all procedural tools to stop this corporate welfare, this corruption, from being propagated," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a 2016 candidate and one of the bank's highest-profile opponents this time around.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico There are high-profile Senate Republicans who didn't support the bank in 2012 and don't support it today, but unlike crusaders, have not made getting rid of it one of their top priorities. This group includes Republican leaders such as Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (Tex.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). They were among 19 senators who voted against the bank back then, a number that has grown to 26 this time around. This group of opponents doesn't agree with the bank's role in the private sector — they point to the fact that 87 percent of the bank's loans go to major corporations such as Boeing, General Electric and Caterpillar — but they aren't willing to make shutting it down a crusade. **Key talking point** : "Just let it go," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the party's 2012 vice presidential nominee.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Most Republicans used to fall into this category, but their numbers are dwindling as the bank's opponents grow in prominence. This group includes pro-business Republicans and Republican-leaning groups like the Chamber of Commerce. One of the lone 2016 candidates to support the bank  is Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), who represents a state in which Boeing, a major recipient of bank loans, is a big employer. And even though business Republicans won Sunday night's vote to reopen the bank with a filibuster-proof majority, they are arguably the biggest losers in this debate. Not long ago, this group dominated the Republican Party. Now, they're fighting to be heard among a growing number of tea-party and increasingly conservative Republicans. **Key talking point** : "Ex-Im is one of the most important tools at the disposal of U.S. companies to level the playing field for trade finance as they seek to increase exports and create jobs at home," the Chamber of Commerce said in a recent statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Final words for Marion Barry, written in condolence books

In quavering script, a child’s handwriting, cursive full of flourishes and capital letters written with a fat marker, people wrote in condolence books for former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. For the past two weeks – save for Thanksgiving Day – people shared memories, thanks and blessings for Barry in the books set out in the Wilson Building. At the front of one book, city leaders wrote personal notes; Mary Cheh credited him with giving the city greater autonomy, Carol Schwartz wrote warmly of their close friendship, Vincent Orange said he would be an older brother to Barry’s son, former at-large council member William Lightfoot said he had learned to speak in public by watching and imitating Barry. “Also, you taught me not to hold a grudge,” he wrote, “but to treat everyone with compassion.” But most of the two books were filled with messages and prayers from the people of the District. Many people thanked him for the summer jobs program. Some wrote, “I love you.” Some quoted Bible verses. A few wrote about help he had given when they were at their most desperate, said he had inspired them to public service or credited him with ensuring city leaders worked for everyone in Washington, not just the powerful. Evangelist Mary Clement, who said she knew him well from civil rights work and volunteering, gave permission for the page she wrote to be shared with The Post, and added, “We just express our prayers and know that his life was well lived. We just thank God for his life, Psalms 23, and peace of God be with him and his family.” An 88-year-old man, Booker Johnson who has lived in Michigan Park in Northeast Washington since the 1950s, wrote for many: “Thank  you MY forever mayor Marion Barry.” A sampling of notes from city leaders, starting with council member David Catania: Schwartz: Cheh:  Anita Bonds:

3 robberies are reported at banks in area;in one, thieves implied that they had a bomb

Banks are where the money is, and they are also where people go to put money in and get it out. All three functions of banks led to robberies this month in the Washington region. In the Manassas area of Prince William County, police said, a man cashed a check at a BB&T branch on Sudley Road about noon Sept. 16. He had just left the bank when a robber came up from behind and knocked him down. The robber took a backpack containing currency and fled, police said. On the same day, in the Germantown area of Montgomery County, a fast-food restaurant employee was taking receipts to a PNC branch on Middlebrook Road about 9:50 a.m., police said. As she walked up to the entrance, police said, a robber grabbed her, pulled her down and took the bag of money. He got into a car, which drove off, police said. One of the most recent robberies of a bank, rather than a customer, occurred about 3 p.m. Friday at the Baltimore County Savings Bank branch on Eastern Boulevard in the Essex area of the county. Two robbers passed a note to a teller implying that they had a bomb, Baltimore County police said. The robbers got money and fled in a vehicle. The vehicle was stopped not far away, and three women were arrested, the police said.

Goodbye paper fare cards

Yes, we admit it. We have a soft spot for paper. And so it is with a heavy heart that we report that the last two Metro stations that sell paper fare cards will no longer do so as of Thursday. The end comes one month ahead of schedule. Metro spokesman Dan Stessel assures us this is all for the best.  The transit agency will save money on maintaining the Rube Goldberg-style mechanics involved in pulling those paper cards in at the fare gates and spitting them back out. Metro has slowly been trying to wean riders off the paper cards, charging those who insist on “legacy fare payment”  an extra $1 per trip. As Adam McGavock, Metro’s sales director told The Post’s Paul Duggan last year: Stessel said the shift to SmarTrip also will mean a speedier entry and exit process. Still, for those of you who have a few of the paper cards laying about, don’t worry. “There is no need to panic,” Stessel said.  “The cards can be used until the beginning of March.” If you’d like to transfer the balance on those cards to your SmarTrip card, Metro has tried to make that easy. You can take the paper cards to a station, feed them into one of the brown refrigerator-sized farecard dispensers and add the balance to your SmarTrip card. You also can go to a Metro sales office. Note: Only undamaged paper fare cards can be traded via the brown machines. And if you’re just feeling nostalgic, you can head over to Naylor Road or Anacostia, the last two Metro stations that were selling paper cards as of this afternoon. Here’s Metro’s video on the phasing out of paper fare cards.

Time to stop the generation wars. We need each other.

We all are deeply concerned about the future of our country. Some people blame immigrants for our problems, others blame religions or people of color or a political party. And some blame people of other generations, as shown by the March 25 Free for All letters “If you read this, thank a boomer, ” in response to “The boomer generation busted it all,” Dana Milbank’s March 12 Outlook review of Bruce Cannon Gibney’s book “A Generation of Sociopaths.” As a boomer, I am trying to understand the frustration. But I know that the only way we will find solutions is to take responsibility together. Raising children is the most humbling of all life experiences, and, when we do so, we learn that no generation lives in isolation. We can find solutions to our current situation by trying to understand the experience of each generation. Members of the Greatest Generation trusted their government and institutions because they had successfully led them through the Great Depression and World War II, but the boomers found the opposite. We were the first generation that grew up knowing about nuclear annihilation. I clearly remember the Cuban missile crisis. We did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school, and my father built a bomb shelter into our tiny, rural Virginia home. While boomers had material adequacy, we never had security. In the Great Depression, generations had to work together to survive, and it may have been this cooperation that enabled victory in World War II. But the Greatest Generation sent boomers into Vietnam. Instead of reliving their fathers’ heroic experiences, soldiers came home feeling betrayed by the government and injured in body, mind and soul. Later, boomers lost their savings to Enron and learned their children could be abused by a church. Many boomers, Generation Xers and millennials sacrifice for humanity, justice and our environment. If you stop by your local food bank or library, you will find boomers volunteering there. Today, many boomers grow old in isolation and loneliness. Many of us cared for our aging parents, but our children have moved far away for jobs. I am frightened because I do not know how to age alone; I have no model in my family for doing that. We need each other. It’s as simple as that. We need to recognize that there are those who gain power and money by making us angry at each other. They are the ones who should be discarded — not immigrants, people of color, people of other faiths or people of other generations. ****Kathy Ellis** , Rixeyville, Va.**

For the first time in decades, Capitol Hill has its own neighborhood rabbi

In 1962, **Rabbi Simon Burnstein** lamented to a Washington Post reporter that in his nearly 20 years as head of the Southeast Hebrew Congregation at 417 Ninth St. SE, four Capitol Hill Jewish congregations had decamped to the suburbs. Southeast Hebrew was the neighborhood’s only synagogue, which made Burnstein the last rabbi on the Hill. In 1971, he moved the congregation to Silver Spring, Md., leaving Capitol Hill rabbi-less. Until now. Last month, **Rabbi Hannah Spiro** took up her newly created position with the Hill Havurah. There’s a new rabbi in town. “Havurah” is a Hebrew word that means a gathering of friends. That’s how this group started 15 years ago, as a lay-led congregation whose members prized the neighborly walkability of Capitol Hill but felt something was missing. “We find a lot of what we need in a very small area,” said **Allison May Rosen** , chair of the Hill Havurah board of directors. “I grew up in suburban Houston. You got in the car to go to the grocery store. Now we have kids who can walk to their sports practices, walk to their dance lessons, walk to school . . .” Why not, they thought, walk somewhere to engage their spirituality? “To be honest, some of the early appeal was probably convenience,” said Allison, who lives near Lincoln Park. “If you wanted your kid to go to Hebrew school, maybe you didn’t want to go very far.” Or, as the motto on T-shirts the Hill Havurah printed up a few years ago put it, “Why Schlep?” At first, members gathered in each others’ homes. Then they started worshiping in neighborhood churches that welcomed the opportunity to fill sanctuaries on the Jewish sabbath, Saturday, in addition to the Christian one, Sunday. In the past year, Hill Havurah has held most of its services at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street NE. That’s where Rabbi Hannah has her office. “They are amazing people to share space with,” she said. “ **Pastor Mike [Wilker]** is wonderful and so welcoming to us. Hopefully we can do more things together as a congregation.” While the last rabbi on the Hill was the 25th generation of rabbis in his family, Rabbi Hannah, 26, is the first in hers. She grew up in North Bethesda and is a graduate of Richard Montgomery High and the University of Maryland. Once a week she travels to Wyncote, Pa., outside Philadelphia, where she’s in her final year of study at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. What sort of rabbi will Rabbi Hannah prove to be? She said one of her teachers, **Rabbi Jacob Staub** , has been an inspiration. “He always talks about different spiritual types,” she said. “Some people get their spiritual nourishment through singing and through prayer to God. Some people through being together in a group of people who know each other and care about each other. Some people get their spiritual high through community service or volunteerism.” The members of Hill Havurah? All of the above. “My goal is to help to support all of that happening at the Havurah, from the meditative to the really dynamic,” Rabbi Hannah said. This being Washington, and this being the Hill, it’s a diverse, highflying flock. Allison does communications in the health-care field. Other members include journalists and federal workers. They’re from across the political spectrum — and the spiritual one. Said Allison: “We have a membership that is very bent on not defining itself by a particular sect of the religion, but rather focusing in on the values and being really welcoming, celebrating and sharing, and raising kids in the Jewish way.” The congregation has 130 “member units” — individuals and families — with about 100 children in its various religious school programs. It’s a modern group — brought together by social media and the Web — but in a way an old one, too: walking to shabbat on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, observing ancient rituals. But if a havurah is a gathering a friends — informal, lightly structured — what does it mean that there’s now a rabbi on the payroll? Does the name still fit? Said Rabbi Hannah: “What the leadership and I have been saying is that if we can maintain a really high level of lay leadership and volunteerism, if we can stay away from a sort of top-down structure and really engage the community in big decisions, I think we can still call ourselves a havurah.” **Twitter: @johnkelly** For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.

Chevy Chase Bank’s posthumous codicil

CHEVY CHASE BANK no longer exists — it was purchased byCapital One in 2009, and its last branch signs disappeared in 2010— but the final years of its existence were apparently not glorious. According to papers filed in federal court by the Justice Department, the bank systematically bilked minority customers seeking mortgages, including at branches in the Washington suburbs, in the three years leading up to its acquisition. Capital One, which assumed legal liability when it bought the bank, has agreed to pay $2.85 million in damages. The settlement is peanuts compared with other fair-lending cases. In the most notorious instance, Bank of America agreed to pay $335 million in 2011 after federal investigators found evidence that its Countrywide Financial lending arm had overcharged more than 200,000 African American and Hispanic borrowers. Still, the Chevy Chase settlement is instructive as a codicil to the banking industry’s role in the financial crisis and as a cautionary tale. According to federal attorneys, the bank ran roughshod over more than 3,100 African American and Hispanic customers who wanted mortgages. At one branch, in central Fairfax County, government investigators found that African American customers who borrowed $250,000 in 2007 were charged points and fees that amounted to $950 more than the amount paid by similarly qualified white borrowers on a mortgage of the same size. According to the Justice Department, that pattern of discrimination affected black and Hispanic borrowers nationwide, but it was concentrated in the mid-Atlantic region — the District, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. Capital One has denied the allegations. At the same time, the bank has been at pains to distance itself from the lending practices that prevailed at Chevy Chase prior to its acquisition, which were common among banks in the years before the financial crisis. That model of mortgage lending was based on aggressive marketing of loans, including in minority communities. At Chevy Chase, “loan production” officers’ compensation was based partly on their success in charging higher rates or fees to mortgage borrowers, and difficult-to-understand terms were not uncommon. Capital One says that after the purchase, it dissolved Chevy Chase’s mortgage business and dismissed its mortgage lending officers. Some of the lending practices in use at Chevy Chase are now prohibited under the reforms in the Dodd-Frank consumer protection law, enacted in 2010. But a glance at the Justice Department’s Web site, which summarizes recent lending discrimination settlements based on race, national origin and other factors, suggests the job is unfinished. **Read more about this issue from Opinions:** The Post’s View: Fix the mortgage finance system The Post’s View: A capitulation on mortgage down payments Robert J. Samuelson: Why haven’t low rates helped the housing market more? Charles Lane: It’s time to fix Fannie and Freddie

D.C. man sentenced to 64 months in prison for three bank robberies

Aside from the obvious “crime does not pay,” several other conclusions can be drawn from an account of the three bank robberies carried out on two days last year in the up-and-coming NoMa neighborhood of Washington D.C. In addition, a visit to a branch of the D.C. public library figures in the account given by prosecutors of the robberies and adds to its interest. According to a statement released on Friday by federal prosecutors, the proceeds of all three robberies together amounted to $6,577. It is a tidy sum, but one that would make many people question whether it was worth the risk entailed in three offenses that prompt a particularly energetic law enforcement response. Based on the statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District, it could also be said that the robber worked quickly. The three robberies occurred within less than 24 hours in all, the prosecutors said. They began at 3:30 p. m. April 20, and were completed before 1 p.m. on the 21st, they said. In addition, it seemed from their statement that something about the neighborhood may have seemed attractive to the robber. All three robberies occurred on First Street NE. One bank, in the 1100 block of First was held up twice, once on April 20, and again on April 21. The other robbery was a block away, in the 1200 block of First Street. The risks might be rated at more than average. The banks are a little more than a 15-minute walk from the Washington field office of the FBI. They are perhaps a brisk 20 minutes from D.C. police headquarters. No weapon was shown in any of the robberies, the prosecutors said. In each instance, they said, the robber went into the bank and passed a note to a teller, demanding money. Then, they said, he left, taking with him both cash and the note. In another unusual facet of the incidents, they suggest in a way how wide a range of visitors the city’s library branches attract. They also suggest the unusual range of activities that may be pursued there. After the third and final robbery of the series, the prosecutors said, law enforcement officers stopped a man not far away from the scene, as he emerged from the library branch in the 100 block of L Street NW. Although the statement did not say so explicitly, the statement suggests that the man may have used his visit to distribute cash around his person. In their statement, the prosecutors said the man was coming out of the library “with the proceeds of the latest robbery stuffed in his shoes and pocket.” According to the prosecutors, Tyrone Edward Wright, 47, of Washington, was found guilty in February of three counts of bank robbery after a trial here in U.S. District Court. the prosecutors said. They said he was sentenced Friday to 64 months in prison. In addition, they said, he was also required to repay the banks the amount taken in the robberies: $6,577.

Man tries to rob bank near White House, FBI HQ

Bank robberies occur from time to time in the Washington area, but some banks by their very location seem to be places a robber would likely stay away from. Such as the Wells Fargo Bank branch in the 1300 block of Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Everyone recognizes 1600 Pennsylvania as the address of the White House. So 1300 is about three blocks away. The Treasury Department is even closer, and, significantly, the headquarters of the FBI is only four blocks in the other direction. perhaps three or four hundred yards away, also on Pennsylvania Avenue. Those are only a couple of reasons why a would-be bank robber might think better of trying to get cash from a bank in the 1300 block of the avenue. But on Tuesday afternoon, somebody did. The D.C./ police said that at a few minutes after 3 p.m. someone entered the bank and handed the teller a note. It demanded money. But, the police said, the teller turned over no money. The would-be robber, the police said, fled. But the police are looking for someone they described only as a “person of interest.” According to the description, he was a black man, about 6 feet 1 inch to 6 feet 3. Police said he was between 40 and 50, with a slim build. The description said the man wore “a blue polo style shirt, with a white shirt underneath, green shorts, light colored socks, and white tennis shoes” He had a blue plastic bag, the police said. The police said they want to identify the person of interest. They said the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force also wants to identify him.

Last call looms for Jay’s, a Clarendon dive bar where ‘we all know each other’

On a chilly Sunday night at Jay’s Saloon and Grille, with a clutch of regulars watching the Packers-49ers game at the bar, owner and bartender Jay Moore welcomes a new customer with a greeting familiar to many: “Make yourself at home.” It’s an implausible suggestion at some businesses, but the atmosphere at Jay’s, with its lending library crammed with paperback suspense novels, dog-friendly patio and worn Old West decor, is far removed from those of the upmarket Clarendon bars nearby. “When you come in here, it’s like coming into your living room,” says Tom Bacon, an IT contractor for the Pentagon and Jay’s customer since the mid-1990s. “Matter of fact, that’s what we call it: ‘The living room.’ ” Adam Porter, a technical writer at the National Institutes of Health, has been a regular for seven years. “We all know each other,” he said. “Every last one of us.” But soon, the bar’s devoted regulars will find themselves dispossessed. Developer Clark Realty plans to build a residential-retail complex on the lot occupied by Jay’s and two adjacent car lots, pending approval by the Arlington County Board and neighborhood residents. In the meantime, Jay’s operates on a month-to-month basis. Jay and Kathi Moore said they haven’t made definite plans after the bar closes. Jay Moore researched starting over elsewhere but found rising real estate prices prohibitive to the prospect. “It’s just too expensive in this area. You can’t run a neighborhood bar and pay your rent. They wanted $18,500 a month for rent for a place this size. And you know if you’re going to be a neighborhood joint, you’ve got to sell your beer at a decent price. You can’t charge six bucks for a bottle of Budweiser.” Both say they’ll miss the many customers who have become friends over the years. “We’ve had weddings here, funerals here. We’ve had a divorce here,” Kathi Moore said, recalling the time she asked a lawyer who worked next door to witness the signature of two longtime customers on their divorce papers. Former government employees who worked in human resources at the Central Intelligence Agency, Kathi and Jay Moore quit their jobs to open Jay’s Saloon and Grille in 1993. In October, the bar held a party to celebrate its 20th anniversary, complete with commemorative T-shirts. In rapidly changing Clarendon, narratives such as the Moores’ are commonplace. In the two decades since they opened their modest bar, the neighborhood once populated by local retail stores and restaurants — many family-owned and multiethnic — has been transformed to one dominated by high-rise residential housing, upscale restaurants and national chain stores catering to the area’s increasingly higher-income demographic. “When we first started, in 1993, it was still like a Little Saigon, with all the [predominantly Vietnamese] restaurants and shops. That made it fun,” Kathi Moore said. “We’re a neighborhood bar — that’s who we are,” she said of Jay’s, which regularly made regional lists of top dive bars. She said it attracted an older demographic than others in the area. “We’re geared toward the 40- and 50-year-olds. They’re the ones that keep us in business, because they come every day. The 20-somethings and 30-somethings, they’ll come over from Mad Rose, Clarendon Ballroom, on a Friday and Saturday night, looking for beer, go back out again.” Jay Moore said his biggest compliment comes from visitors who tell him Jay’s reminds them of a bar back home.“And I get it from people from the North, the South, East, West, Midwest. Someplace you can just roll out of bed, come in in your sweats, don’t have to do your hair or makeup.” The group of regulars watching football at the bar takes a grim view of the impending closing. “It’s sad,” Bacon said. “Known these people for many years, and the big question is, where will all these people go?” Longtime customer Rick Callin suggested that Clarendon’s large-scale retail and residential development comes at the expense of small businesses such as Jay’s that contribute to local character. The same thing happened to Georgetown in the 1980s and ’90s, he said. “They kicked out all the [bars with] personalities, and everything that made Georgetown what it was.” As for what bars he’ll frequent after Jay’s closes its doors, Bacon is emphatic: “There are no bars around here,” he said dismissively. “When you go [to other Clarendon bars], you’re just in a business. And that’s the big difference. This is home. It’ll be a sad day when it closes.”

What is the euro zone doing?

I understand why Cyprus is rejecting the terms of the European Union's bailout. What I don't understand is why the European Union is offering these terms. Why would they choose to bail out Cyprus in a way that is almost custom-designed to undermine one of their proudest and most important achievements?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Let's consider this from the American perspective. Imagine that, until 2008, we didn't have national bank insurance. If you put your money in a Vermont bank, and the bank went down, your money might well be gone. Now imagine that in 2009, as a result of a series of huge bank runs caused by the financial crisis, we passed banking insurance. We created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Every bank deposit up to $100,000 was completely insured by the federal government. And lo, there was much joy and celebration in the streets, because finally, at long last, the American banking system was truly safe. But here we are in 2013. Connecticut still isn't recovered from the housing crisis. They need some kind of federal bailout. And so the federal government says fine, they'll bail out Connecticut, but part of the money will come by taking 5 percent out of every single bank account in the state. That way, all those hedge funders who do their banking in Connecticut will have to pay up, too. How does that not completely and utterly destroy the banking insurance system? Can the answer really be, "Your deposits are safe and fully insured, unless the federal government decides to arbitrarily take money out of them?" And if that is the actual deal being offered, then isn't the banking insurance worthless? Why would you bank in the euro zone rather than, say, the United Kingdom? That, as far as I can tell, is what's happening in Cyprus. The euro zone will bail out Cyprus only if Cyprus will agree to take some 6 billion euros, strap them to a missile, and launch it directly at the currency union's deposit insurance system. That strikes me as a far costlier solution than simply ponying up the 6 billion euros needed to save Cyprus. The fact is that Cyprus is a tiny country with a tiny economy. Saving it in such a way that you undermine the banking system of the entire euro zone seems insane.

Davis homers twice as Orioles win finale

BALTIMORE — As the Baltimore Orioles’ disappointing 2015 season came to a merciful end Sunday with a 9-4 victory over the New York Yankees, it definitely felt like the end of an era. Before Sunday’s season finale, first baseman Chris Davis signed leftover bats in silver Sharpie and left them in some of his teammates’ lockers. There were far too many handshakes and goodbyes for this to simply mean, “See you next spring training.” And before Davis disappeared into the home dugout for the final time this season, and maybe ever after homering twice to complete one of the most prolific seasons in franchise history, the crowd at Camden Yards chanted, “We want Chris.” The Orioles (81-81) won their final four games of this season to finish 2015 at .500, avoiding a losing season, but next year’s team likely will look markedly different. It’s hard to believe that this time last year, Baltimore was gearing up for the postseason, having just celebrated a division title, and was on its way to advancing to the American League Championship Series. Now, the Orioles enter their most uncertain offseason in years. Six key players — headlined by Davis, catcher Matt Wieters, left-hander Wei-Yin Chen and reliever Darren O’Day — will become free agents, and the club likely won’t be able to bring many back. Davis, who will be one of the most coveted hitters on the market, said he’d like to stay, but given Baltimore’s frugal approach to free agency, even the fans at Camden Yards seemed to think this was goodbye. If it was farewell, Davis gave a fitting goodbye with his eighth multi-homer game of the season with a pair of two-run blasts, including one on what could be his final at-bat as an Oriole. After Davis rounded the bases in the eighth, he was welcomed to the dugout by a standing ovation from the announced crowd of 33,224. In the fifth, Davis hit a two-run blast off Yankees reliever Bryan Mitchell into the left field seats. Davis ended the season with his second major league home run crown. He hit 47 homers, the fourth-highest single-season total in club history. ** — Baltimore Sun  **

Man robs bank impersonating Santa, or maybe ‘Duck Dynasty’ character, police say

A man wearing a dirty-gray Santa beard rushed into a suburban D.C. bank on Saturday morning, fired at least one shot into the ceiling and robbed tellers of cash before fleeing in a maroon sedan, police say. The robbery sent police cars screaming into the quaint, brick-lined streets of downtown Laurel, Md., just as the PNC Bank branch at 390 Main Street opened at 9 a.m., police said. The bank remains closed, and Laurel and Prince George’s County police continue to patrol nearby neighborhoods looking for the getaway car or anyone who may have seen it. “Fortunately, no one was hurt,” said Laurel Police Department spokesman Pete Piringer. Bank employees described the robber’s disguise as a Santa beard, Piringer said, “but it looked more ‘Duck Dynasty’ to me,” he said, referring to the streaked gray beards worn by several cast members of the popular, and now politicized, A&E; television series. Piringer said the suspect fired at least one shot and was in and out of the bank within three minutes. “We believe someone saw the car afterward, and we are asking for the public’s help,” he said. Anyone with information is asked to call the Laurel Police Department’s tip line at 301-498-7645, or the department’s non-emergency line at 301-498-0092.

‘It is too risky’: Marijuana group says PNC Bank to close its accounts amid fears of a DOJ crackdown

One of the nation’s leading marijuana legalization groups says PNC Bank has notified it that it will close the organization’s 22-year-old accounts, a sign of growing concerns in the financial industry that the Trump administration will crack down on the marijuana business in states that have legalized it. The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) lobbies to eliminate punishments for marijuana use but is not involved in growing or distributing the drug — an important distinction for federally regulated banks and other institutions that do business with such advocacy groups. Nick Field, the MPP’s chief operating officer, said a PNC Bank representative told him in May that the organization’s accounts would be permanently closed July 7 because an audit of the accounts revealed that the organization received funding from marijuana businesses that handle the plant directly. “They told me it is too risky. The bank can’t assume the risk,” Field said. Although marijuana businesses are legal in some states, many banks will not provide services to sellers or growers because the drug is banned at the federal level. But policy and advocacy organizations such as the MPP have been spared. A bank’s severing ties with an organization that accepts donations from such businesses signals a new level of concern in the banking industry. PNC Bank declined to discuss its relationship with the MPP, but a spokeswoman said that “as a federally regulated financial institution, PNC complies with all applicable federal laws and regulations.” The bank has held the MPP’s accounts since the organization was formed in 1995. Some advocacy groups say the abrupt closing of the MPP’s accounts is an unpleasant side effect of growing uncertainty about protections for the marijuana industry in states that have legalized it. The industry enjoys loose protection via a combination of legislative amendments and memos from the Justice Department that effectively allow states to operate medical and recreational marijuana businesses without federal interference. But many advocates worry that the Trump administration is changing course to enforce federal laws and dismantle key protections for the expanding industry. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a longtime opponent of marijuana legalization. During a Senate drug hearing in April 2016, Sessions — then a Republican senator from Alabama — said, “We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it’s in fact a very real danger.” When asked during his confirmation hearing in January whether he would enforce federal drug laws as attorney general, Sessions replied, “I won’t commit to never enforcing federal law.” The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. Last week, Sessions wrote to congressional leaders asking for the ability to prosecute medical-marijuana dispensaries. Sessions implored members of Congress to reconsider a rule enacted in 2014 to prevent the Justice Department from using federal funds to block state laws that legalize medical- marijuana cultivation and use. The sale of recreational marijuana, in contrast, is loosely protected by the 2013 “Cole memo.” The memo, issued by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole during the Obama administration, instructs state law enforcement agencies not to use their resources to prosecute the authorized sale of marijuana in states where it is legal. The vice president for regulatory compliance at the American Bankers Association says these protections are not enough reassurance for financial institutions. Banks are subject to federal regulation to prevent fraud, money laundering or breaches of privacy. “Because marijuana is illegal under federal law, banks accepting any money associated with its sale could be investigated for money laundering,” said Rob Rowe, the ABA executive, adding that many banks do not make a distinction between advocacy organizations and businesses that sell or grow marijuana. But Field’s organization, the MPP, and many other advocacy groups, such as NORML, say banks’ concerns are overblown. The Justice Department has never investigated a bank for offering accounts to state-legal marijuana businesses. In addition, Field said, advocacy organizations are legal entities that are subject to strict scrutiny by the IRS. “We are a registered 501(c)(3) and (c)(4). We have yearly audits. We are compliant with the IRS,” he said. “It doesn’t get any clearer than that.” Field said the MPP is still seeking a new bank. **** John Hudak, an expert on marijuana policy and governance at the Brookings Institution, suspects that the MPP’s difficulty in finding another bank reflects banks’ fears that Sessions intends to roll back protections for the industry and enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act. “It’s no secret,” Hudak said. “It’s a situation that is creating an increasingly uncertain policy environment.” Amid the uncertainty, Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) introduced a bill to ensure protections for banks providing “financial services to cannabis-related legitimate businesses.” The Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, introduced in April, has 44 congressional co-sponsors. The first provision of the bill would prevent federal regulators from terminating banks’ federal deposit and share insurance “solely because the depository institution provides or has provided financial services to a cannabis-related legitimate business.” Many marijuana advocacy organizations hope the bill will pass, offering the industry the banking security it seeks. “It’s one thing to take a position about making marijuana legal,” said Mason Tvert, the MPP’s communications director. “It’s something different to say these businesses should be able to be bank legitimately.” Marijuana advocacy groups point to public opinion as an indication of the industry’s legitimacy. Last year, 60 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup thought marijuana should be legal. Justin Strekal, policy director at D.C.-based NORML, said the attorney general is fighting a losing battle against legalization. Strekal is optimistic that organizations such as the MPP, as well as marijuana businesses, will not face the setbacks they have dealt with in past. But he cautioned that things could become worse before they improve. “This is the death rattle of prohibition,” Strekal said. “While we are confident in the end that we will win, it does not mean that [Sessions] isn’t going to do as much damage as he can to the industry between now and when he is no longer in power.”

Palena’s last day: Former employees, regulars salute Frank Ruta

They arrived whenever they could on Saturday. Many had no reservations; they just wanted one last taste of roast chicken or the chance to say thank you. Some had no plans to stop at the Cleveland Park establishment until they heard the news: After the evening’s service, chef Frank Ruta was going to close down Palena, his much-lauded restaurant and cafe, because of mounting debts. The announcement served as a beacon for Palena regulars, former employees, Cleveland Park neighbors, industry peers, hangers-on and just about anyone who felt some connection to the restaurant that held down a corner location in the neighborhood for 13 years. By 6:30 p.m., the bar at Palena Cafe was three deep; among the well-wishers was celebrity chef José Andrés, who had just arrived in Washington that morning from Los Angeles. Andrés’s appearance enticed Ruta out of the kitchen, a pair of James Beard Award winners exchanging hugs over the premature death of one of the District’s most respected restaurants. Andrés had made a quick reservation when he learned the news, but once he arrived, he allowed other waiting diners to take over his four-top. The Spanish chef said Palena had long been a favorite of his two oldest daughters when his family lived in the Chevy Chase neighborhood. “I don’t know if it was Carlota or Inés who’d say, ‘Daddy, can we go to Palena instead of your restaurant?’ ” Andrés said. He was one of many chefs, restaurateurs, bartenders and others who came to pay their respects. Mark Furstenberg (founder of Marvelous Market, Breadline and the upcoming Bread Furst), Ashok Bajaj (restaurateur behind Rasika, the Oval Room and many others) and Saied Azali (owner of Perry’s and Mintwood Place) all stopped by on Saturday, Ruta said. Ripple and Roofers Union owner Roger Marmet arrived early the same evening with a bottle of champagne for Ruta. “I hope you celebrate all the good,” Marmet told his Cleveland Park peer. Ruta was gracious to his supporters but was characteristically uncomfortable at being the center of attention. Then again, for Ruta, the reality of the closure hadn’t fully sunk in. The chef spent much of last week doing what he always does — running a restaurant — even though he’d learned on April 21 that he and his landlord, Federal Realty Investment Trust, could not broker a new deal to save Palena, which reportedly owed more than $125,000 in back rent. Ruta said he was open to any number of options, including downsizing to one side of the building. “It just got to the point where whatever number they needed and whatever we felt we needed just couldn’t get together,” Ruta said. Federal Realty could not be reached for comment. Palena’s financial woes are almost too complicated to unravel, Ruta said. The cafe portion of the business expanded into a former Magruder’s space in late 2010, but that was not by itself the root of the problem; Ruta said the expanded cafe performed well for a full year. But revenues declined in late 2012 and early 2013 before picking up again in the middle of last year. Among the factors: a lack of foot traffic in Cleveland Park (which caused the early death of Ruta’s lunch service), a lack of marketing and a lack of interest in fine dining in the neighborhood. Palena is the fourth restaurant in Cleveland Park to call it quits, following Lavandou, Dino and Pulpo. “If you read the Cleveland Park listserv, people are in an all-out panic that Cleveland Park is dying,” said Marleen Welsh, a neighborhood resident who was waiting for a seat at the bar Saturday with her husband, Brant Shalikashvili. Former Palena employees didn’t wait until the last hour to toast their old boss. Despite Ruta’s attempts to keep the closing under wraps until Friday, when he released an announcement, Palena alumni and other insiders surprised the chef by filling his restaurant on Thursday night. The returning staff included chefs, bartenders and others who have become fixtures on the D.C. hospitality scene, including Derek Brown (owner of Mockingbird Hill, Eat the Rich and Southern Efficiency in Shaw), Julien Shapiro (chef at Brown’s restaurants) and Jonathan Copeland (chef at Ghibellina on 14th Street NW). There were no big speeches, said Brown. It was just a chance to be “closer to Frank” before the crowds descended over the final weekend. “We’re the children that Frank spawned. We all learned from him,” Brown said. “He wasn’t easy on us all the time, but he was a great teacher and inspiration.” Ruta’s cellphone and e-mail inbox were buzzing all weekend, he said, including a message or two from the White House, where he worked for more than a decade. Ruta hadn’t returned many messages yet. There would be time for that as he wrapped up operations and started to debate his own future. (He doesn’t have a clue yet but plans to remain in Washington.) There was one tribute, however, that he couldn’t ignore: As the final minutes passed, he walked into the bar area, where friends and regulars remained. He received a standing ovation. “It was kind of nice, mostly embarrassing,” he said. **More fromFood:** Weeknight Vegetarian The Immigrant’s Table Smoke Signals Spirits Column Beer Column

Regulators OK WashingtonFirst’s acqusition of Alliance

A shareholder vote is the last remaining hurdle for WashingtonFirst Bank’s acquisition of Alliance Bankshares Corp. after regulators cleared the companies’ merger plans. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Virginia State Corporation Commission have each signed off on the $24.4 million deal, the companies announced on Tuesday. Reston-based WashingtonFirst’s and Chantilly-based Alliance’s shareholders are scheduled to vote on the merger during special meetings scheduled for the third week in December. Should all parties approve, the deal is expected to close before the end of the year. “We are thrilled to be able to add Alliance’s valuable Northern Virginia franchise to our growing footprint in the Washington metropolitan area,” Shaza Andersen said in a statement following the initial purchase agreement in May. This is the second time in a year Alliance has cleared regulators to be absorbed by another bank in the region. But early this past December, Eagle Bancorp, EagleBank’s parent headquartered in Bethesda, abandoned its plans to purchase an ailing Alliance for $31.2 million, with both sides citing irreconcilable differences. There were “some points around which we simply couldn’t get,” Alliance President and CEO William Doyle Jr. said shortly following the breakup. Alliance suffered a steep fall during the height of the recession, and even as the economy and the company’s own margins began turning back around, the bank bid goodbye to its chief executive and chairman in May 2010. The company began searching for buyers less than a year later. _FollowJ.D. Harrison on Twitter._

Eagle Bancorp to sell shares to pay back government program

Eagle Bancorp is hoping to raise more than $70 million by selling 1.9 million shares of its common stock to pay back a government loan program, the Bethesda, Md.-based company announced this week. Funds from the sale will be used in part to repay $71.9 million to the Small Business Lending Fund, a program established by the Treasury Department in 2010 to provide capital to community banks so they could lend more to small businesses. Eagle also plans to use the proceeds to open new branches and possibly pursue future acquisitions, according to Ron Paul, Eagle Bank’s chief executive. “It’s business as usual here,” Paul said by phone from Chicago, where he was meeting with potential investors. “The money will go toward normal operations plus paying off” the small-business lending fund. The Treasury Department has invested more than $4 billion through the Small Business Lending Fund by buying shares of preferred stock in community institutions. The recipients in turn boosted their lending to small businesses by $14.7 billion, the Treasury Department said. Eagle Bancorp received $56.6 million in funds in July 2011 as part of the program and inherited an additional $15.3 million in funds when it purchased Virginia Heritage Bank last year. Shares of Eagle Bancorp closed down 3 percent at $35.65 on Tuesday, following the Monday announcement about the stock offering. Eagle Bank, which currently holds $3.39 billion in local deposits, is the area’s largest community bank, with 21 branches in Washington, Maryland and Northern Virginia. At the end of 2014, the company had $5.25 billion in assets.

Obama’s farewell message on democracy: ‘Show up. Dive in. Stay at it.’

Not long ago, President Obama had expected to use his farewell address to the nation to celebrate his administration’s achievements before handing them off to a Democratic successor. Instead, in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory, a president whose political rise was propelled by his ability to inspire hope arrived in Chicago on Tuesday night facing a new reality. Tempering the disappointment of his supporters and soothing their anxiety has become, in his waning days in office, Obama’s last, unexpected campaign. “For every two steps forward,” Obama told the crowd at the McCormick Place arena, “it often feels we take one step back.” Obama took the stage amid an air of nostalgia, joined by his wife and daughter, the vice president, a gaggle of former aides and 18,000 supporters who braved frigid temperatures this week to score a ticket. Familiar campaign anthems from U2 and Bruce Springsteen played at the arena where Obama had celebrated his 2012 reelection victory. Most of his predecessors had delivered their final addresses to the nation from the more formal environs of the White House, but Obama eschewed that tradition, flying home on his final trip on Air Force One before leaving office next week. The choice was made to symbolize a return to the roots of his political career, and Obama has always felt more comfortable and energized at campaign-style rallies before big, adoring crowds. “Hello, Chicago, it’s good to be home!” he began, before being cut off by cheers from the crowd. Basking in extended applause, Obama feigned impatience: “We’re on live TV here . . .” But the warm embrace from his adopted hometown may have served another purpose, too, in helping to insulate Obama and his faithful from the stark reality that his goodbye speech was not the crowning valedictory they had so recently anticipated. Over the course of 4,500 words, the president delivered a determined pep talk and reality check, warning his audience not to lose faith in democracy or to give up participating in the American experiment. “Show up. Dive in. Stay at it,” he urged. “Sometimes you’ll win. Sometimes you’ll lose . . . And more often than not, your faith in America — and in Americans — will be confirmed.” To some in the arena, Obama’s advice might have rung hollow. The president himself had made the case, in his closing campaign argument for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, that he was optimistic about her chances because he had never lost a bet on the wisdom of the American public. Since her defeat, Obama has shifted his rhetoric away from the “fierce urgency of now” that had animated his first campaign in 2008 to a longer frame of reference that has become his mantra as he faces the prospects that Trump could undo much of his legacy. “America is a story told not minute to minute, but generation to generation,” Obama said in a blog post ahead of his farewell address. “We’ve run our leg in a long relay of progress, knowing that our work will always be unfinished.” In a series of exit interviews with journalists and private meetings with disappointed staff since Election Day, Obama has professed that progress, rather than moving in a straight line, zigs and zags but never stops moving forward. As Air Force One departed Washington, cable networks blared live coverage of the Senate confirmation hearing of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s nominee for attorney general who was Obama’s chief antagonist in the fight over immigration reform. “Yes, our progress has been uneven,” Obama said in Chicago. “The work of democracy has always been hard . . . But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion.” Presidents have often used their farewell remarks to speak of the challenges ahead and reaffirm American values and ideals, but Obama’s appearance in Chicago took on an added undercurrent of tension over his past criticisms of Trump as temperamentally unfit for office. Not long before the president took the stage in Chicago, news broke in Washington that U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed Obama, and later Trump, on unsubstantiated reports that Russian operatives purportedly had sought to obtain damaging revelations about Trump’s personal life and finances. The president did not criticize Trump directly, and he quieted the crowd when it began to boo after he alluded to the pending transfer of power in 10 days to the incoming administration. Instead, Obama referred obliquely to his successor, reiterating a warning he had first made last spring that the erosion of what he called a “common baseline of facts” in the nation’s political debate that has accentuated “naked partisanship.” “For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions,” Obama said Tuesday. “Isn’t that part of what so often makes politics so dispiriting?” he asked. “It’s not just dishonest, this selective sorting of the facts; it’s self-defeating.” In the end, however, Obama professed that he was “even more optimistic about this country than when we started,” and he grew emotional, wiping a tear from his eye with a handkerchief, as he thanked his family, staff and supporters. He capped his remarks by tapping the lectern with his right hand, a superstition he started in the 2008 campaign. This time, however, it was not emphatic and urgent, but rather soft and understated, the restrained final gesture of a president who once symbolized hope but was departing the national stage at a time of unpredictable change.

Paid off your mortgage? Congratulations, but there are still some things you need to do

Congratulations on making your last mortgage payment. With nearly one quarter of Americans with a mortgage underwater on their loans, there are millions of homeowners who would love to be in your shoes. Once your loan is paid off, make sure you receive the canceled documents back from the lender. Frequently, lenders will mail the canceled note and mortgage (or trust deed) back to the borrower. When you receive the canceled documents, place them in your house file and scan them into your computer so that you have an electronic record. Then you’ll know that the lender has truly ended its interest in your property. More important than the canceled documents — even though they are quite important — is the document your lender must send to the office that records documents where you live evidencing that the mortgage lien on your property has been released. In the case of a deed in trust, the release from the lender releases the deed back to the homeowner. Either of these two documents, when properly filed or recorded, will give notice to the world that your prior lender no longer has an interest in a loan on your property. The next important matter to take care of is to call your homeowner’s insurance company and request that they remove your former lender’s name from the policy. At some point when you had the mortgage, your lender requested that it be added as an additional insured on your homeowner’s insurance policy. Now that it is no longer your lender, it should not be listed on the policy. If you should have a claim and the lender is still on the policy, you might have to deal with the lender to get any money you are owed from the insurance company. You want to avoid that. So, make the call today. Once you’ve taken care of those three items, you should be in pretty good shape. In some cases, the lender will send the release to you, and then you must then make sure that it gets filed or recorded with the proper government body. Again, congratulations on paying off your loan.

Clock running on foreclosure reviews

If you lost your house to foreclosure, the last thing you might want to do is relive the pain. But if you suspect that something was wrong during the foreclosure process, you need to take advantage of an independent review mandated by federal banking regulators. Last year, 14 large residential mortgage servicers were required by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision to retain independent consultants to review their foreclosure actions. This was the result of widespread complaints by consumer advocates and borrowers about deceitful and improper foreclosure practices by some mortgage servicers. If consultants find fault during the review, then borrowers who suffered financial injury because of errors, misrepresentations or other problems in the foreclosure process may get money or some other remedy. At the end of last year, a consulting firm acting on behalf of federal bank regulators sent 4.3 million letters to individuals who might be eligible to have their foreclosures reviewed. Through May 17, more than 194,000 people responded, asking for a review. Another 142,000 people have been selected for review because their foreclosures were related to a bankruptcy or the foreclosure might have violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which provides certain rights to members of the military. “If people believe they were wrongfully injured by a foreclosure error in 2009 and 2010, they should request a review,” said Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the OCC. “They give up no rights by requesting a review.” To also qualify, the foreclosure had to be on the person’s primary residence and the mortgage servicer had to come from one of 14 participating companies. If you received a letter, you might have thought, “Why bother?” You might be skeptical that anything will come of it. But don’t lose out on the chance to get some redemption if it turns out that your mortgage servicer did something wrong. “The review can take several months, and they are very detailed,” Hubbard said. There’s another bonus to finding out whether you qualify for a review. Requests from eligible borrowers in which a foreclosure sale is imminent will receive priority attention, the OCC has said. But don’t expect too much. You still need to work with your mortgage servicer to determine whether the foreclosure can be prevented. Although asking for a review won’t automatically postpone or stop a foreclosure, at least the extra attention might help. The review isn’t just for folks whose homes were sold through foreclosure. Consultants will be looking at cases in which homes were slated for foreclosure but the process stopped because payments were brought up to date, the borrower entered a payment plan or modification program, or the home was sold in a short sale or given back to the lender. But you have to act soon. The deadline for requests to get a review by an independent consultant is July 31. Additional letters will be sent out early in June, Hubbard said. And to increase awareness of eligibility, the Federal Reserve has put together a short video that can be found on YouTube by searching for “Independent Foreclosure Review PSA.” Here are some additional things that might have gone wrong in your foreclosure that consultants will examine: ●The mortgage balance was listed incorrectly. ●The foreclosure occurred while someone was waiting for a modification although the person submitted all of the paperwork on time. ●A borrower thinks the mortgage payment and/or the fees that the servicer charged were inaccurate. The review is free, and there is just one review process. Go to _the Web site www.   independentforeclosurereview.   com_ for a list of the 14 mortgage servicers and for information about the review and claim process. You can mail your request form or submit it online. To get the form online, you have to click on the link for your servicer. The company you sent your monthly mortgage payments to is your mortgage servicer. If you need help completing the form or if you have questions, call 888-952-9105. Put your request in. You really have nothing to lose and possibly something to gain. Readers can write to Michelle Singletary at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or singletarym@   washpost.com. Personal responses may not be possible, and comments or questions may be used in a future column, with the writer’s name, unless otherwise requested. For previous Color of Money columns, go to postbusiness.com.

Shrinking Jesuit population forces closing of D.C.’s St. Aloysius Gonzaga parish

St. Aloysius Gonzaga, a 153-year-old Jesuit parish known for an eclectic congregation of students, homeless people and social-justice activists, will close this summer, a casualty of the country’s shrinking Jesuit population. The announcement that the Jesuits could no longer staff the 300-family parish known as St. Al’s officially came last weekend, but rumors had percolated for months. The parish, at I and North Capitol NW, is attached to Gonzaga College High School — also run by the Jesuits — and will remain part of the school for various services. The congregation will merge with Holy Redeemer Parish, another Catholic congregation a few blocks away. The Father McKenna Center, the drop-in center for homeless men that has been in the St. Aloysius building for nearly 30 years, will continue to operate there. In a statement read at Masses last weekend, the Rev. James Shea, head of the Jesuits’ regional office, said St. Al’s “will continue to live on through the people and the legacy of faith and service that long has been a hallmark of the parish.” “I ask you to join our Province in prayer for a renewal in priestly vocations to the Jesuits, and especially for the parishioners of St. Aloysius during this difficult time,” he wrote. The closing of St. Al’s is part of a shrinking of Jesuits from the area where they created the country's first Catholic parish, in 1641, in St. Mary’s County. They were the first Catholic priests in the Colonies. Today, they are merging three East Coast branches into one. Some of Washington’s most esteemed institutions are Jesuit: Georgetown University, Georgetown Preparatory School, Gonzaga College High School and the 10,000-member Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown. The transition for members of St. Al’s, most of whom do not live near the parish, will begin July 1 and continue through the summer.

Michael O’Sullivan, parish priest and Capitol Hill presence, dies at 81

With a walking stick in hand, a baseball cap on his head, and his clerical collar tucked unobtrusively in his pocket, the Rev. Michael O’Sullivan “walked his parish,” the streets, mews, courts, byways, avenues and alleys of the eclectic Capitol Hill neighborhood where he was priest and pastor of St. Peter’s Catholic Church. He was “like a doctor making house calls,” said one of his parishioners, Kevin McCormally. If you were a regular at St. Peter’s who missed Mass more than a couple of Sundays in a row, Father Mike (a.k.a. Father O’Sullivan or just plain Father O) was likely to come knocking at your door, just to let you know you were missed and just to make sure you were okay. If you were homeless and destitute, he might stop on the street and chat and maybe find you an odd job at his church, something to put a little money in your pocket or food in your tummy. If you were a street person, he’d welcome you to Sunday services at St. Peter’s. On his ambulatory rounds, Father O’Sullivan made several regular stops, including the National Capital Bank of Washington, two blocks from St. Peter’s, where he exchanged ritual greetings with his friend George A. Didden III, the late chief executive of the bank. “Top o’ the morning to you, Father.” “And the rest of the day to you, George.” From 1970 until he retired in 2005, Father O’Sullivan was pastor at St. Peter’s and a visible presence just about everywhere on Capitol Hill. His stewardship at St. Peter’s was among the longest parish ministries in the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. He won an award from the Capitol Hill Community Foundation for his service in the neighborhood. He died March 15 at the Sacred Heart Home in Hyattsville of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 81. His church announced his death. Michael Joseph O’Sullivan was born Jan. 9, 1932, in Kilgarvan, in a mountainous area of County Kerry, Ireland, one of six children. Two sisters survive. He decided in high school to be a priest. He attended St. Kieran’s seminary in Kilkenny, Ireland, and in 1955 was ordained. He asked for duty as “a missionary any place in the English-speaking world” and was posted to Washington. After serving at St. Camillus Church in Silver Spring and Nativity Catholic Church in the District, he was assigned to St. Peter’s. There are widely circulated stories about Father O’Sullivan’s arrival at the church, where he found the front doors locked and a dog in the rectory that barked at visitors as if to frighten them away. Lynn Freeman, a church office administrator, said the new priest let it be known that very day that he was going out for a walk and he wanted the dog gone by the time he got back, and it was. He was told that he had moved to a tough neighborhood where the streets were not always safe and the church had to be locked as a security precaution. The gentrification of Capitol Hill had just begun. There were still blocks of down-at-the-heels housing and clusters of urban decay. “To take back the streets, all you’ve got to do is walk the streets,” Father O’Sullivan told The Washington Post in 2000. No longer would he keep the church on lockdown. As predicted, there were thefts. Someone made off with candlesticks. But in the mind of the new pastor, the symbolic message of an open door was worth the cost. St. Peter’s School, founded by the parish shortly after the Civil War, had fallen upon hard times by the early 1970s, and there was talk that it might close. The church building and the rectory were in disrepair. During the next 31 / 2 decades, Father O’Sullivan established and raised money for a property maintenance trust fund that now stands at $2.5 million, according to Bill Phillips, a parish member who looks after financial matters. Extensive repairs were made at the church, the school and the rectory, but not before 10 or 12 years ago was the church air conditioned. Previously, it seemed during the summer months that attendance at St. Peter’s was declining, while it rose by a comparable amount at nearby St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which was said to be cooler. Attendance at St. Peter’s went up when air conditioning was installed. The church now has a membership of 1,100 families; the school has an enrollment of 220 in kindergarten through the eighth grade. In his life away from the church, Father O’Sullivan went to New York several times a year to see performances at the Metropolitan Opera, and he played golf on Fridays with a group of other Irish priests. He never forgot his Irish heritage. There was a St. Patrick’s Day party every year at St. Peter’s, complete with a blessing of shamrocks in the Gaelic tongue by Father O’Sullivan. This year’s party was held March 16, the day after Father O’Sullivan died. There was, as always, the blessing of the shamrocks, but no one to pronounce the words in Gaelic. They were blessed in English.

Goodbye and good riddance, 112th Congress

On Jan. 3, the 112th Congress of the United States of America finally ended. Thank God. To properly evaluate the 112th, consider the record of its predecessor, the 111th Congress, which ran from January 2009 to January 2011. The fighting 111th passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known as the “stimulus”), the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”), and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. It passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and expanded both the Serve America Act for community service and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. It created significant new anti-tobacco regulations, ratified the New Start nuclear arms reduction treaty, ended “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the armed forces and agreed to the 2010 tax deal, which extended the Bush tax cuts in return for the passage of middle- class stimulus. The laws passed by the 111th Congress were controversial, particularly among Republicans. They were also big, bold initiatives that, if not always fully equal to the size of our problems, surely perched on the outer edge of Congress’s capacity to deliver solutions. Love it or hate it, the 111th Congress governed. No Congress in recent history has a record of productivity anywhere near it. What’s the record of the 112th Congress? Well, it almost shut down the government and almost breached the debt ceiling. It almost went over the fiscal cliff (which it had designed in the first place). It cut a trillion dollars of discretionary spending in the Budget Control Act and scheduled another trillion in spending cuts through an automatic sequester, which everyone agrees is terrible policy. It achieved nothing of note on housing, energy, stimulus, immigration, guns, tax reform, infrastructure, climate change or, really, anything. It’s hard to identify a single significant problem that existed prior to the 112th Congress that was in any way improved by its two years of rule. The 112th, which was gaveled into being on Jan. 3, 2011, by newly elected House Speaker John Boehner, wasn’t just unproductive in comparison with the 111th. It was unproductive compared with any Congress since 1948, when scholars began keeping tabs on congressional productivity. When it ends, the 112th Congress will have passed about 220 public laws -- by far the least of any Congress on record. Prior to the 112th, the least productive Congress was the 104th, from January 1995 to January 1997. Not coincidentally, that Congress also featured a new Republican House majority determined to ruin a Democratic president in advance of the next campaign. The 104th, however, passed 333 public laws -- almost 50 percent more than the 112th. The 112th stands alone in its achievement of epic failure. Of course, raw productivity statistics can mislead. After all, if the 112th Congress’s laws were particularly worthwhile, or if its low productivity reflected a period of political calm and economic growth, the slow rate of legislating might even be a good thing. In this case, however, the raw data mislead in the other direction. The 112th Congress wasn’t merely unproductive: It was devastatingly counterproductive. The 112th found legislating so difficult that lawmakers repeatedly created artificial deadlines for consequences and catastrophes intended to spur them to act. But like Wile E. Coyote with his endless supply of Acme products, when the 112th set a trap, the only sure bet was that it would explode in its collective face, forcing leaders to construct yet another hair-trigger legislative contraption. The near-shutdown of the federal government in early 2011 was the first of these self-detonated disasters, the near-breach of the debt ceiling in August 2011 was the most damaging, and the fiscal cliff was the dumbest. In each case, Congress mainlined a dose of fear and uncertainty into an economy already beset by too much of both. In each case, the deadline failed to spur responsibility; instead, Congress punted on hard decisions while setting up a new deadline to supplant the old, discarded one. In that way, the 112th ended as it began: by creating a mess it couldn’t clean up. The resolution, such as it is, of the fiscal cliff simply sets up another fight in the weeks ahead over the debt ceiling and sequestration. Continued fear and uncertainty over the impending battle is the legacy of the 112th to the nation’s economy. Thanks, guys. As a result of its good works, the 112th Congress was the least popular since pollsters began keeping score. According to Gallup, the 112th’s approval rating fell to 10 percent in February 2011 and again in August that year. Those are the lowest readings in Gallup’s 38 years of surveying. When another polling firm, Rasmussen, asked Americans in March 2011 how they’d feel about the U.S. turning into a communist country, 11 percent said they’d approve. So congratulations, 112th: You were, at multiple points, less popular than communism. The 112th didn’t even achieve the narrow political objective that Republican leaders sought. Insofar as there was a theory behind their effort to grind the U.S. government to a halt by making Congress a destructive force, it was that American voters would blame the failures of Washington on the party in charge of the White House, leading to President Obama’s defeat. Yet Republicans were so mistrusted that, despite the previous two years of ineffectual governance and a weak economy, Obama was re-elected by a margin of 5 million votes, and Democrats won more votes than Republicans for House and Senate seats, as well. The source of the 112th’s dismal performance is easy enough to diagnose. According to political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who’ve developed a highly respected gauge of political polarization, the 112th was the most polarized Congress in U.S. history, with House Republicans exhibiting a particular leap in partisanship. Moreover, the results of the 2010 election divided power among House Republicans, Senate Democrats and a Democratic president, ensuring that party polarization would lead to political paralysis. Unfortunately, the polarization and paralysis exhibited by the 112th Congress are functions of long-term political trends, and there’s no evidence that they’ll lift anytime soon. So while the 112th Congress was surely one of the most broken and incompetent in our history, the worst is probably yet to come.

Local Digest: Bank robbed near FBI’s home; Woman groped in Alexandria

The FBI didn’t have far to go to investigate a reported bank robbery Friday morning in the District: It occurred two blocks from the agency’s headquarters and only a few blocks from the FBI field office that is handling the case. Someone robbed the Capital One Bank at 701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, according to the FBI, which is working with District police and with Metro Transit Police to track reports that the robber may have headed toward a Metro stop, said FBI spokesman Andrew Ames. The Archives Metro station is nearby. Ames said he did not have information about whether the robber displayed a weapon or a note and did not have a detailed description. The J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters is at 935 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. The Washington field office is at 601 Fourth St. NW. **— Mary Pat Flaherty** A woman was groped while shopping at an Alexandria store Thursday, an assault that police believe is related to a series of similar incidents during the past seven months. Police said a 31-year-old woman was inside the HomeGoods store in Kingstowne Center around 3 p.m. when a man grabbed her from behind. The man immediately fled, despite attempts by people nearby to stop him, police said. Police said the groping may be linked to nearly two dozen similar incidents in Fairfax County’s Springfield area. Thursday’s groping differs from the previous assaults because it took place indoors, inside of a business, with other people nearby. **— Maggie Fazeli Fard** A Herndon woman visiting an acquaintance in Prince William County was abducted and raped late Thursday, and police are looking for her attacker, according to a Prince William police department news release. A 31-year-old woman was walking in the area of Maplewood Drive and Peakwood Court in Manassas when a man approached her, displayed a handgun and forced her into the woods in a secluded area behind a townhome on nearby Vermont Place, police say. He then raped her, police say. Police are looking for a black, 5-foot-9 man of medium build, last seen wearing a black puffy winter jacket, dark gray jeans and a black-and-white bandanna. **— Jeremy Borden**