Credit Union Watch blog posts final entry

A prominent blog on credit union issues will no longer be updated.

Keith Leggett’s Credit Union Watch, which launched in 2009 in the wake of the corporate credit union crisis, posted a final entry on July 31. Leggett, a former senior economist for the American Bankers Association, was a frequent commenter on a host of topics relevant to the industry. Though Leggett retired from the trade organization in 2015 after 20 years there, he continued to run the blog.

Despite his association with the ABA, Leggett wasn’t exclusively critical of credit unions. Rather, a common theme over the years was a call for credit unions to be treated equally with banks. While that sometimes took the form of calling out the industry’s tax exemption, just as often it was related to calling for consistency across federal banking regulators. Some members of the NCUA board sounded a similar call during confirmation hearings.

“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. “I think the convergence of events caused me to decide that this is a good time to leave. 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, so therefore this felt like as good a time as any to call it quits.”