If you’re ready to put your money under your mattress after watching the stock market hurtle south at a ferocious pace Monday and after watching a banking world that’s seeming to come unhinged, local bank presidents offer a surprising amount of hope.
This is a good time to live in Texas, agreed Fidelity Bank President Tommy McCulloch, First Bank’s President Chuck White and American National Bank’s President Bo Stahler.
Each spoke to the Times Record News in telephone interviews late Monday.
The three bank presidents stressed — in independent interviews — that the Wichita Falls economy, with its broad job base and good people, is still strong, and that the Wichita Falls banks simply reflect their patrons.
You can prove the truth of that statement by asking yourself two key questions, White said in a conversation that mirrored the comments of his fellow bank presidents.
(1) Did you experience the euphoria in the last few years of your home doubling or tripling in value?
(2) When you drive down the streets of Wichita Falls, do you see foreclosure signs everywhere you look?
No?
“We didn’t see the big boom that the rest of the country saw, so we’re not going to see the big deflator, the big bust,” White said.
In Wichita Falls, housing prices have been — and remain — reasonable.
“You and I would scratch our heads and say, ‘How do people afford paying half a million dollars for a house? How do teachers afford that?’ But they had to pay that to get housing” in some areas of the country like California and Florida, White said.
Wichita Falls residents are still working at jobs, enjoying a diversified employment base, with stable jobs at large employers like Sheppard Air Force Base, the Wichita Falls Independent School District, Midwestern State University, the agriculture industry and the oil and gas industry.
“Think of all the employment that has provided, with good stable salaries,” White said. “Our economy in Wichita Falls is strong. It’s good. Therefore, the local community banks that invested in our community are strong.”
First Bank’s mortgage portfolio is “extremely strong” with “less than one tenth of one percent in delinquencies,” he said.
“I’m not here to tell you that we’re not getting any phone calls (from fearful customers),” White said. “We are. We are working real hard with our customers to soothe those fears.”
Many of the calls revolve around fears that all their money is not covered by FDIC insurance, he said.
For anyone concerned that their money is not FDIC insured, First Bank account representatives take them to the FDIC Web site at www.fdic.gov and walk them through it.
Bank personnel are also helping customers move their money around to get that immediate FDIC coverage, if they don’t already have it. “There are lots of ways that a husband and wife can have more than $100,000 insured in one bank. If they’re concerned, they need to call their bank. Talk to them. Work through that,” White said.
Wichita Falls banks are still lending money the way they did six months ago, said Tommy McCulloch of Fidelity.
And, yes, you can still get a car loan, he said.
“I don’t think any of the local banks have changed the way they’re making loans,” he said. “If someone wants to get an auto loan, I know at Fidelity, that has not changed. If a business wants a loan, that has not changed. We’re doing things the same way we were six months ago. It’s hard for me to imagine a circumstance where we would change that.”
His biggest worry is that eventually, all this gloom-and-doom talk will sap the confidence of the people of Texas and Wichita Falls, and they’ll quit spending.
“If everybody keeps telling you that it’s really, really bad, though it may not feel bad to you if you still have your job,” it’s hard not to believe it, McCulloch said.
But this is a big-boy problem, said American National Bank President Bo Stahler.
“All this has to do with the big guys, the national banks, the big regional banks. It’s business as usual here,” he said.
The impact of the bank failures and credit freeze on American National Bank “has been nonexistent, other than the fact that we’re getting calls from depositors that you expect from a crisis. People are getting skittish. All we can do is reassure them,” Stahler said.
His bank is well capitalized, the credit quality of its loans is strong, “and we have plenty of access to liquidity to fund loans with,” he said. “At this point, anyway, there’s not any hit on us.”
That may change, however, if Congress doesn’t pass a relief bill soon, he said.
“If they don’t get this bill passed sooner or later, it’s probably going to filter on down through the system, which will affect the availability of credit and make it tough for John Q. Consumer. But that’s if nothing gets accomplished.”
Stahler said he’s convinced the government will step in with some sort of help, even though the House of Representatives voted down the first relief package offered to them Monday.
“I’d be shocked if they don’t get this resolved within the next few days or a week,” he said. To let Wall Street crumble under the weight of the market forces is too risky, he said. “They can’t let it happen, and they know it. Everybody is trying to get a political leg up.”
To cope with all the craziness pouring from your television’s financial channel, White advises putting it all in perspective by paying attention to who is talking about what.
Most of the panic surrounds people who make their money trading short term. But that’s not the Wichita Falls way, he said.
“Our business is long term. We’re talking to business owners and people buying houses — long term. They’re not speculators. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think it starts on Main Street. Our community is doing well, and we haven’t seen the excesses that some other parts of the country saw.”
White once worked for a “big bank” but said he is happy to be with a community bank now, where life and business still reflects much of the banking integrity portrayed by James Stewart as George Bailey in the movie classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where Bailey, a banker, was trying to do the right things at his bank for the right reasons.
“What I see in community banking is what’s good and right about being a banker,” White said. “This will sound like a commercial, and for that I apologize, but they want their community and its organizations to survive, because they live in that community. Because they know if the community is doing good, the banks will do well. The banks are a reflection of the community they’re in.”
Though John McCain may be getting hammered for believing that the basic United States economy is good, White said he believes it, too.
Still, he understands the fears. “It’s hard not to be afraid, isn’t it? I’m going to tell you that I believe this, too, shall pass.”
The gyrations of California or Florida markets don’t affect Wichita Falls, he said. “We’ve taken precautions to insulate us from those upstream super banks. We invest in Wichita Falls, in real life human beings.”
Education reporter Ann Work can be reached at (940) 763-7538 or by e-mail at worka(at)TimesRecordNews.com.
