Community Bankers of Iowa Monthly Banker Update July 2014 | Page 7

Fine Points Written By: Camden Fine, President and CEO of ICBA Our Train is Rolling It has been uplifting to hear and see. Washington has been positively abuzz lately with constructive dialogue about community banks and Main Street community banking. The speeches and congressional testimonies, the endorsements and the recommendations echoing ICBA’s policy messages have sounded from every corner of federal policymaking. Members of Congress, White House officials and agency leaders have contributed to the discussions, demonstrating a critical awareness and understanding at the highest levels of government of community banking’s current priorities, challenges and issues. Our industry’s policy positions have not only been heard loud and clear, they also are understood as true, valid and important. And in our nation’s capital, allies are won first by hearing, then understanding and ultimately agreeing with your point of view. began issuing a separate set of community banking statistics as part of its quarterly industry reports, a move recognizing how overall industrywide statistics can obscure and misrepresent the vastly different operating realities of megabanks and community banks. • With outspoken and enthusiastic support from the president, a California community banker, Maria Contreras-Sweet, was appointed to lead the Small Business Administration. These milestones didn’t occur by happenstance. They reflect a broad appreciation for community banks, a result of persistent advocacy work over many months and years by tenacious community bankers. They also signal our industry’s real, concrete progress overall in Washington and, most important, the significant victories that we’re close to achieving. While riding a rolling freight train it can be Just as important, policy action has hard to distinguish the forest from the trees. accompanied the renewed talk. A few Depending on your perspective, the scenery examples: easily blurs together. It’s too easy to lose • In addition to holding hearings on sight of our collective progress—and your regulatory burden, members of Congress bank’s progress—amid the daily rush, tumult have continued to steadily advance several and focus of promoting and defending our bills, putting many of ICBA’s major Plan for industry’s immediate and long-range interests Prosperity regulatory relief measures in line to as we do. And it’s more challenging still become law possibly this year or next. that our greatest issues—cutting regulatory • Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and overkill, expanding tiered regulation and Gov. Daniel Tarullo, reining back too-big-towho heads up the fail—are intertwined. None Fed’s supervision, can be fully and sufficiently called for a more addressed without also “Our industry’s policy positions proportionally tiered fixing the others, yet these regulatory framework complex issues must often have not only been heard loud and be dealt with separately specifically to ease excessive burdens through piecemeal on community banks. clear, they also are underst