By Bryan Mogensen
As the economy has continued to struggle during the past couple of years, credit unions have watched some of their members struggle to repay their loan obligations. Unemployment, underemployment and continued depressed real estate markets are among the factors contributing to this trend.
As you might suspect, the financial difficulties of members have resulted in many credit unions taking on significant loan losses and additional credit quality risk in their outstanding loan portfolios.
Earlier in the recession, existing financial reporting standards were making it difficult for users of financial statements to determine in which product lines a credit union was experiencing losses and which lines had the highest credit risk.