Chip Filson
The Seated Boxer, an iconic ancient Greek work of art, shows a grizzled veteran of the ring, equal parts resigned and ready to spring into action.
What I like is a sense of respite from competition, the powerful athletic physique and the tiredness that surrounds his humanity. Is he a winner this day? Are there more fights to go? How will his efforts be remembered?
These are questions that all of us encounter, in literal or figurative ways, in our daily efforts.
In the CEO’s words: At Good Neighbors we do not have a “growth” strategy; we have a “strength” strategy. Which is to say that we are not looking to increase members by numbers but instead are trying to grow members intentionally by focusing on those who are philosophy/mission aligned and who want to participate as owners. This is because we no longer have exclusively our closed SEG group and are instead tasked with building our own common bond.
Co-op fest (Buffulo) is a great opportunity to meet others in the area who are like-minded and tell them about the credit union. My friends at Cooperation Buffalo call these people the “coop curious” – people who are open and interested in learning more about cooperatives.
We participate in the Cooperative Fellowship.
From that website:
Cooperative Changemakers: A Community Power Fellowship is an intensive 11-week training for cooperative entrepreneurs and advocates building an economy that puts people first.
Cooperative Changemakers aims to activate and empower those interested in joining and contributing to Buffalo’s growing cooperative community. The Fellowship fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the development of skills essential for building democratic power in our communities.
Participants have the opportunity to engage with local cooperators and develop actionable plans to bring their visions to life. The Fellowship seeks to cultivate a vibrant and engaged community of cooperative entrepreneurs and advocates, driving positive social and economic change in Buffalo.
Source: Thank you Emma Smalley, CEO, Good Neighbors Credit Union
At a recent reunion a colleague told a story of his granddaughter’s college interview. The panel was professors and tutors from the college. Her area of study was liberal arts not science.
How might you or your grandchild have answered?
She paused for a time, then said: ” I don’t know the answer. But here is how I would test to determine what might be the situation.”
She was admitted to the college.
Many personal decisions and business options do not have factually provable answers. Such as 1 + 1 = 2. Experts, analysis, prior examples and other learning can suggest possible options. But ultimately many outcomes are unknowable and require reflective judgment.
Last week a credit union professional asked, do credit unions have too much capital.? He provided no background, just the question.
I asked several credit union leaders how they would respond. Their universal answer: “it depends.” They said each credit union’s circumstances are different–the member base, the area’s economy and multiple other factors. . This is something each credit union must determine for itself.
This may be procedurally correct. However, is there a conflict as the persons making the decision benefit most from overcapitalization? One former CEO of a large credit union publicly stated that a net worth ratio over 7% is “stealing from the members.”
Higher net worth takes some of the performance pressures off management and boards. Unlike public companies, there are no market comparisons forcing them to meet a minimum level of return on equity, or ROE. This is the primary measure of effective capital management.
Is a more objective standard required? The distribution of capital ratios suggest the question of overcapitalization is widespread.
This is the distribution of net worth ratios for all credit unions at yearend 2025. NCUA’s rule states that 7% equity ratio is considered well-capitalized.
|
Net Worth Ratio
|
# of CUs at
12/31/2025
|
Total Assets
|
|
13+
|
1,982
|
$408,743,666,638
|
|
12-13%
|
422
|
$246,934,302,564
|
|
11-12%
|
457
|
$520,062,897,151
|
|
10-11%
|
514
|
$523,027,212,223
|
|
9-10%
|
499
|
$428,895,471,832
|
|
8-9%
|
304
|
$264,042,605,226
|
|
7-8%
|
136
|
$57,902,263,277
|
|
<7%
|
61
|
$7,407,376,727
|
| TOALS |
4,375
|
$2,457,015,795,638
|
At the highest ratio level, 45% of credit unions hold 17% of assets or almost double the well-capitalized rule. A number of these are smaller credit unions, but there is at least one top ten credit union in this tier.
Most credit unions report annual increases in net worth, no matter the level, as a success indicator. The common expectation as to how much capital is enough is one word: more.
Because leaders may not know a precise answer, this does not excuse the need for objective processes and relevant comparisons for setting a maximum level and for returning excess net income to members. Effective capital management begins with ROE. Pubic markets generally expect outcomes in the 10-12% range as the minimum standard.
Do plants have feelings? The too much capital question can be answered by every credit union. The analysis should be transparent for members. It is an example of management’s accountability to members of their stewardship of the collective savings.
Public presentation of a capital cap is a sign of thoughtful management. “More” is not a capital plan. Nor is an ever increasing net worth ratio a success.
A cap may even be more important in an era of market exuberance with bank buys, fintech investing and crypto partnerships announced almost daily. A capital maximum could bring some much needed discipline in situations where overcapitalization seems to be “burning a hole in management’s pockets.”
When capital exceeds the well-capitalized level (7% for credit unions) organic growth is sometimes never enough to satisfy ambition. Acquisitions come next. A current example.
From Jamie Dimon , CEO JP Morgn on organic growth and acquisitions:
| “If you sit around a lot of management meetings, the first thing they do when they’re not doing well in organic growth is they start to bulls—t about M&A.” |
| — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, explaining that he warns his team not to get lost in pipe-dream deal talks instead of improving their own operations.
And yet, Dimon today announced that the bank could consider an acquisition worth up to $20 billion in the next few years now that it has greater flexibility from regulators to spend capital. WSJ May 27, 2026 |
Tomorrow’s followup: with credit unions’ average net worth over 11.3% at March 31, 2026, do individual coops have excess capital? Are these billions of equity above required amounts fueling bank acquisition efforts? Or fintech investments?
A number of economic and business leceaders in this era of stock market exuberance note that many of their peers have never managed through an economic downturn. Not just an nterest rate cycle as initiated by the Federal Reserve in 2022 to fight inflaiion. But an actual recession.
A second potential bubble indicator beyond the stock market’s seemingly unending upward trajectory, is the multiple schemes to get rich-quickly. These opportunities are based on some virtual digital innovation with an intriguing but unknowable future value. Hence crypto, stable coins and other forms of new financial transaction-payment business offerings.
The new CEO of Wells Fargo was asked whether the bank would be offering stable coins for consumers. His reply was pragmatic. A stable coin is just putting a wrapper around the US$. “For countries with higher inflation than the US,it might make some sense. But the use-case in the US is not clear. Every time you use it you incur transaction costs.”
Retired Warren Buffet of Berkshire was outspoken inhis views on crypto and virtual currencies..
“Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don’t produce anything… In terms of value: zero.” (CNBC, 2020)
In this 2023 CNBC interview Buffett explains the consumer and market fascination with digital options as another example of the human desire to gamble,. Humans have an impulse to to take a chance on winning big even when all odds are that will not happen.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGVt8Y2ZdWI)
This is a trailer for a recent movie on the crypto environment: Everybody is Lying to You for Money:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZR7LncSmEE)
McKENZIE-the film’s creator: Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. There’s the bubble idea that the price could, over time, keep going up, as new people flock to crypto as the story continues to spread. And then crime gives it a use case, a reason to be valuable.
The future will be different than today. Many physical aspects of our world will undergo makeovers and upgrades.
As stewards of member resources and community investments, the challenge for coop leaders is what changes are based on long understood core values; and what new enterprises rely or prey on human shortcomings.
Are crypto and stable coin “assets” adding to a community’s future or merely facilitating member participation in a gigantic, universal digital game? Is this an area where your credit union should educate versus coordinate member experimentation?
The 2026 irst quarter TrendWatch update from Callahans was a very positive description of a financially sound cooperative system. Here are two slides summarizing key macro trnds. The full slide deck is here.
Two of the five takeaways by Callahan’s staff were:
The commentators referenced the economic stress citizens feel with a 3.8% CPI increase; the majority who feel their financial circumstances are getting worse; and the K-shaped economy in which stock market’s gains are going primarly to those already well off, not those liiving on their weekly paycheck.
With net worth at 11.3%, or over 400 basis points above the 7% well capitalized level, should credit unions continue to add more to retained earnings?
With multiple options, how should credit union leaders allocate their success between these two priorities? How would members view this decision?
From a WW II poster exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
War as business. America’s advantage.
Multiple examples of concern about inflation in wartime.
War is a shared burden with the home front.
A new war and a new generation.
War and protests
Solid Anchor, US Navy outpost on the SonAnDoc river, Vietnam
Returning to the USS Windham County, LST 1170, February 1971.
Returning home to families waiting for ship to tie up in Yokosuka, Japan.
This is a story of how one soldier’s wartime conduct created an example that will inspire future generations. His decision is one all free societies honor in their Memorial Day ceremonies.
(May 11, 2926)
He was captured in eastern Ukraine. He was unarmed. He was surrounded. He looked at the men who captured him and said two words:
Slava Ukraini.
Then the gunfire came.
Oleksandr Matsievskyi was born on May 10, 1980, in Chișinău, Moldova. He lived there for 28 years before moving to Nizhyn, a quiet city in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region. He worked an ordinary job. He was a husband to his wife, a son to his mother Paraska, a father to his boy Mykhailo. Nothing about him suggested he would become a name the world would remember.
On the first day of russia’s full-scale invasion, he went to the recruitment office. They turned him away. He came back. On March 11, 2022, he was finally enlisted into the 119th Territorial Defense Brigade. He trained as a sniper. By late autumn he was deployed to Bakhmut, and then to Soledar – the meat grinder where russia was throwing men into Ukrainian fire by the thousand.
On December 30, 2022, Oleksandr and four comrades were caught in a counterattack on the outskirts of Soledar. Mortar and small arms fire pinned down the reinforcements trying to reach them. Contact was lost around noon. There were no witnesses left to tell what happened next – the rest were dead or missing.
His mother recognized him in the first frame. So did his son. So did the men who had served beside him.
What the world saw was a man with nothing left. No weapon. No way out. No chance of rescue. By every measure russia understood, he had already lost.
But Oleksandr did something they could not account for.
He stood up straight. He smoked. He looked them in the eye. And before they pulled the trigger, he gave them his answer – the only one that mattered.
Slava Ukraini.
The voices on the video, in russian, snarl back: Die, bitch.
They thought they were ending his life. They were making him permanent.
Within days, his words were repeated by presidents and prime ministers. Schoolchildren learned his name. Streets in Ukraine were renamed. A statue went up in his hometown. President Zelenskyy gave him the title Hero of Ukraine, posthumously, and his mother Paraska accepted the medal through tears. She told reporters her son had said to her, more than once: Mum, I will never let them capture me. She said it wasn’t a slogan. It was something inside him – a core.
I keep coming back to that word. Core.
Because what Oleksandr showed in that trench wasn’t bravery in the action-movie sense. He wasn’t charging a machine gun nest. He wasn’t saving anyone. He was already lost, and he knew it. What he had left was the question every Ukrainian has been forced to answer since February 2022: who are you, when there’s nothing left to lose?
His answer was two words long.
This is what russia has never understood about us, and what it still doesn’t understand today. They imagine we fight because we are commanded to, or paid to, or tricked into it. They cannot conceive of a people who fight because the alternative – living on their knees, in their world, by their rules – is worse than dying on their feet.
Oleksandr was 42. He had a wife. He had a 17-year-old son. He had every reason in the world to beg, to bargain, to say whatever the men with rifles wanted to hear.
He chose differently.
That choice is the inheritance he left us – every Ukrainian who came after, every soldier in a trench tonight, every child who will grow up in a free Ukraine because men like him refused.
Glory to Oleksandr Matsievskyi.
Glory to the heroes.
Glory to Ukraine.
For-profit firms always have one foot in the grave via maximizing their liquidation values via the speculation of being compensated for a change of ownership.
At its core, cooperatives assume a life cycle vision of an infinite marriage with the consumer’s need for a voice in the ownership of their communities’ focus and evolution. My voice in my community. (from a cooperative entrepreneur)
In America we live lives in much freedom even if we may disagree with certain specific leaders or political agendas..
So familiar is America’s circumstance that it is easy to forget freedom’s universal human appeal.
The following brief excerpt is how freedom sounds, looks and feels when it is regained in individual lives. No words are needed.
When was the last time you felt this deep sense of intense, overwhelming emotion to be alive, again?
(click X to go beyond the Facebook login page, and turn on sound at athe top of the video)
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1333307288675719
This poem is based on a shared cultural experience, the 1950’sTV show, You Asked For It.
Only one episode is recalled which sparks a question on life and meaning:
Is your slingshot useless in this new world? A gift forgotten?
You Asked For It
There was a show on TV called
You Asked For It. Viewers would write in
and ask to see unusual things, such as
the world’s greatest slingshot expert.
I watched it every week
on our humble Motorola, although
the only episode I can remember now
is the one about the slingshot expert.
He was a grown man, as I recall,
and he lived in an ordinary place like New Jersey.
At a distance of ten or twenty paces
he could pulverize one marble with another.
He could hit a silver dollar
tossed into the air. He was the kind
of father I wanted to have,
an expert shot, never missing.
And I think of him now, perhaps long dead,
or frail and gray, his gift forgotten.
Just another old guy on a park bench
in Fort Lauderdale, fretting about Medicare,
grateful for the sun on his back, his slingshot
useless in this new world.
If a credit union improves its capital ratio while its members’ average credit score drops, did it have a good year?
We don’t have a standard way to answer that and I think that’s a problem.
Financial health metrics for institutions are mature, required, and reported quarterly. Member financial health metrics are voluntary, inconsistent, and often absent.
To my credit union colleagues: