A well-known blogger about credit union issues will no longer post regularly about the industry.
Keith Leggett’s
“With the pandemic and the recession, I just wasn’t sure that it felt like the right time to be somebody out here who is a credit union critic,” Leggett said in an interview.
“The convergence of events caused me to decide that this is a good time to leave,” he added. “I had been thinking about it for a little while, but I wanted to see it through with regard to what happened with the taxi medallions and the field-of-membership lawsuit, and those have been largely resolved. … This felt like as good a time as any to call it quits.”
Leggett, a former senior economist for the American Bankers Association, was a frequent commenter on a host of topics relevant to credit unions. Though he retired from the ABA in 2015 after 20 years, he continued to run the blog.
Despite his ABA ties, Leggett’s blog wasn’t exclusively critical of credit unions. Rather, a common theme over the years was that credit unions and banks should be treated equally.
While that sometimes meant calling out the credit union industry’s tax exemption, just as often Leggett argued for consistency across federal banking regulators. Some members of the National Credit Union Administration board made similar arguments during confirmation hearings.
Ending the blog "does not mean that I will quit following credit unions" and the NCUA, Leggett noted in his final post, one of more than 3,000 he has turned out over the past 11 years. "I may even opine on arbitrary actions by NCUA."
