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Tough times face the banking industry in the United States today. This transition might mean that it is time for you to either investigate new lines of work or maybe to start your own business.

It is very hard emotionally and practically to land a new job in a down economy. While you once served in a position of power and had a staff of many, there is no guarantee that you will in the future. Dealing with those life changes can be extremely tough for those involuntarily changing jobs.

If you are thinking about maybe starting your own business, then you’ll have to think about aspects of running a business that you might have had to deal with before, promotion.

At the bank you had a big marketing department that took care of the sales side of the business, but now that you might be considering launching your own new business, don’t forget that responsibility is now squarely in your lap.

Maybe the first think to consider is printing a business card or doing something much bolder like poster printing to promote your new business.

Use this transition time to ask yourself if you’ve been happy in the banking world. Maybe now is the time to evaluate if that world makes you happy, and if it doesn’t then maybe this is the time to reinvent yourself.

Downsizing can be either a blessing or a curse. For those that try to hold on to once what was, the curse is trying to replace that lost job with another similar position. Or maybe losing the job is a blessing if it gives you an opportunity to take a look at your life, decide what is most important to you and consider downsizing your life to reduce incoming earning pressure so you can enjoy your life rather than stress about it.

Banks are failing, consolidating and disappearing on a regular basis, the banking world is consolidating and jobs are being phased out, maybe yours. As one behemoth banks gobbles down another the economies of scale raise their ugly head and entire departments are eliminated.

So if your job was to vanish, your good banking job, what would you like to do? Would you reinvent yourself, would you go back into banking? What would you do?

We’ve now swung from the job worry times when India outsourcing was all the rage to a time when there are fewer bank jobs to even outsource. I wonder how many of those bank employees that are soon to find they don’t need to put their pants on each morning to go to work will stay in banking or turn to other careers?

Banker one day and then e-procurement or reverse auctions expert the next. Rough economic times should give in banking pause to remember that it is easy to become the person on the other end of the phone being called by the bank for payments. All it takes is a sudden and unforeseen economic crisis like we experienced in September, 2008.

Be thankful for your banking job, it could easily be gone tomorrow.

In the debt advice world, groups are getting more calls from worried bank employees who are now facing downsizing and layoff with the contraction of banks.

Even the very same bank employees that were responsible for carrying out bank policies, now find themselves on the opposite site and looking for home equity loans and home equity line of credit to help make ends meet. And rather than be wise shoppers for mortgage interest rates, when you are desperate they don’t care about the rate, just the ‘yes’.

So easy is it to slip from one side of the valley to the next. While bankers are pursuing what they believe to be their ethical pursuit of profits first, I wish there was a way to also inject some amount of reality and humility into their vision for today in the banking world you can have a job one day and your bank can fail the next.

I’m not sure if there is value in remembering that old adage that what goes around, comes around, but it’s true and my banking friends need to remember that.

There is so much I could have written about recently with the meltdown of Wall Street and the massive bailout about to be delivered by the taxpayers. But it is a struggle to beat up on bankers who have made it clear in conversations that their ethical mission is the pursuit of profits for the bank and not to do what is ethical for the customer.

When faced with logic and a corporate culture like that, the Wall Street bankers should be receiving a national medal instead of outrage and disdain. At least I’m sure some of them think so.

“Why are you mad at us. You wanted the economy stimulated and let us self-regulate. How can you be angry we did what you wanted?”

Bailing out Wall Street will not fix this problem as long as the accepted norm is to put profits before everything else in the financial services industry. No, it will only be a matter of time before abuses in the pursuit of profits will undermine financial stability again.

Over in the article “The Right Thing: The Financial Company You Keep” an excellent point is made,

“It’s dishonest for an institution to advertise `We’re here for you’ when really you’re nothing but an asset that can be bought and sold,” says John Waggoner, author of Bailout: What the Rescue of Bear Stearns and the Credit Crisis Mean for Your Investments. “Expecting kindness from your mortgage lender is like expecting kindness from a soft-shell crab.”

The banker image used to be of a local businessman you could trust, but what of the modern banker. Sure we still have local bankers that care because they live in the communities they serve but the largest banks seem to put little effort in restoring a culture of ethics into banking or financial services.

I’m left pondering if it is even possible for a bank to act ethically in the interest of the customer and the bank or are we not left with a legacy that it is more appropriate to field strip a consumer from their money and bad on them if they actually trusted the bank.

There is one thing that really makes me frustrated, it’s when banking situations arise from personal experience. It’s just less stressful when banking problems happen to the other guy.

I just posted Citibank Staff Incompetence Costs Me $1,000 and Stranded for a Weekend in Philly and it made me wonder about when it is ethical to say you’re sorry.

When is it okay for a banker to really apologize for a mistake? I’m not talking about the “I’m sorry you’ve had that experience but I can’t help you.”, pathetic excuse. I’m looking for that old fashioned, “I value you you as a banking customer, sincerely apologize for the error and we’ll do everything we can to fix the problem for you?”

Are modern banking ethics more about maximizing profit, avoiding liability and have we lost the ability to deliver good customer service with an insufficient investment in customer service?

What do you think?

I lost my husband to cancer ten years ago. Shortly before he died I bought him a farm, which he greatly enjoyed with my stepson. The local banker who wrote our mortgage, (and also owned the real estate company which sold us the farm), became very friendly with the two of them. My husband told me that he wanted the banker to be a part of our family, help raise his son after he was gone.

After my husband’s death the banker was very friendly, and very pushy, wanting to marry me, take care of the farm, help make my husband’s dreams come true, etc. Foolishly I trusted him — (and started dating him). He went on a spending spree with my money and created enormous problems for me.

Every deadbeat who was behind on loans at his bank, every person he needed to curry favor with, ended up with some of my money. I had to fire them all and redo everything from scratch. The worst was that he authorised all sorts of construction work on my home without consulting me first — then I got hit with the bill. The work was faulty and it cost me over $300,000.00 to fix the problems.

He also misrepresented me in real estate transactions, costing me quite a bit of money.

At one point he didn’t want to pay interest on my CDs at his bank, (which he inherited from his father). A little intervention from the father finally got me my money back, but not without legal intervention.

I am told by a lawyer that there is nothing I can do because there is no ‘banker’s code of ethics’ against dating a client: as doctors and lawyers have.

I know I was a very foolish, very naive, distraught widow. Do I have any options ?

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

MARLTON, N.J. (AP) - January 18, 2008 — A high-ranking executive of a collapsed subprime mortgage lender jumped to his death from the Delaware Memorial Bridge on Friday, shortly after his wife’s body was found inside their Burlington County home, authorities said.

The deaths of Walter Buczynski, 59, and his wife, Marci, 37 - the parents of two boys - were being investigated as a murder-suicide, according to the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office.

Prosecutor Robert Bernardi said Evesham Township police went to the couple’s home in the Marlton section of the township around noon after a male caller asked them to check on Marci Buczynski’s welfare. Her body was found in a bedroom.

Authorities would not provide further details on her death, saying only that she was pronounced dead at the scene and that an autopsy would be performed sometime Saturday by the county medical examiner’s office.

About 20 minutes after her body was found, officers from the Delaware River and Bay Authority Police Department received reports that a man - later identified as Walter Buczynski - had parked his car on the bridge and jumped from the span.

Crews continued to search for his body Friday night.

Bernardi said a motive for the murder-suicide was not immediately clear. The couple’s children were being cared for by family members, Bernardi said.

Walter Buczynski was vice president of Columbia, Md.-based Fieldstone Mortgage, a high-flying subprime mortgage lender that made $5.5 billion in mortgage loans and employed about 1,000 people as late as 2006.

However, it has since filed for bankruptcy and now has less than 20 employees. The company had recently filed court papers seeking approval to pay about $1.1 million in bonuses that would be divided among Buczynski and other staffers so the company could wind down its lending operations and go out of business.

One of the recent credit offers that has been sent to me from my efforts at I Buy Junk Mail contained this flyer below.It made me wonder where the line was between clever loan marketing and an out and out bribe to take out a loan?Is a cash bonus the same as paying someone to take out a loan?Cash out from a loan has been around for a long time but this advertisement seems to present it in a different way.What is your reaction to this flyer?Click on image below for bigger image.

In Washington, lawmakers are scrambling to find a solution to the subprime mortgage crisis. One plan under consideration would freeze interest rates on some borrower’s variable-rate loans. Another proposal involves raising the dollar limitations on mortgages the Federal Housing Administration can legally insure. And there are some who think the U.S. Government should establish a federal agency to refinance troubled loans at lower interest rates. But in the rush to find a remedy, one action is noticeably missing: where are the indictments, legal or editorial, for the people responsible for creating this mess?

I remember when Freddie Mac first began securitizing residential mortgages in the 1980s. Banks, including the one where I worked at the time, discovered a financial windfall. We were able to rid our balance sheets of fixed-rate mortgages, enjoy an immediate boost in revenue, and earn ongoing fees for servicing the loans. But once the income stream started, there was no turning back.

Financial institutions started relying on securitization revenue to meet their quarterly earnings forecasts. Hungry for mortgages to securitize, banks got lax in their lending practices; as a result, commission-based loan originators approved nearly every homebuyer’s application. Mortgage-backed bond issuers, who buy loans from banks, also relaxed their standards; instead of demanding an 80/20 loan-to-equity ratio for mortgages they bought, they gradually lowered the required equity amount from 20 percent of the home’s value to no equity at all. The flow of easy mortgage money led to inflated home prices and, fortunately for banks, higher mortgage amounts. In short, mortgage securitization turned many bankers into predatory lenders.

To be sure, the subprime mortgage meltdown has cost high-ranking officials at companies such as Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup their jobs, but there have been few criminal charges filed. However, the attorneys general of California and Illinois are investigating Countrywide Financial, which recently announced that it would lay off 12,000 workers, for dubious lending practices. Hopefully, more probes will follow.

Some will argue that borrowers are responsible for getting themselves in over their heads. But many lenders lured people into loans they couldn’t afford. And for that, they should face criminal prosecution.

A reader asks:

“What if any makes the difference between SIVs and Enron?” 

What do you think? Aren’t both approaches both simply to hide the true condition of the underlying accounts?