Saturday, October 24, 2009

Pray, but watch the capital reserves!

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From the Strib:

Riverview Community Bank, an Otsego firm that attracted national media attention several years ago for espousing prayer in the workplace, has been shut down by state regulators.

The six-year-old bank, which has $108 million in assets and branches in Otsego and Anoka, was an aggressive real estate lender, once boasting the fourth-highest concentration of real estate loans-to-capital among community banks in the state. The bank was hard hit by the wave of foreclosures that began hitting Wright County in mid-2007.

The photo, incidentally, is of a painting that hung in the bank. (Can’t find the TwitterPic link at the moment.) It will be interesting to see what the bank’s new owners will do with the painting. Look for it on eBay; it may have value some day as a piece of painful early twenty-first century kitsch.

No word yet on whether Katherine Kersten will claim that the act of the FDIC in shuttering the bank was a denial of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause rights of the bank owners.

There is religion, and then there is creepy magical thinking. Jesus shaking hands in a bank office falls on the creepy magical thinking end of the spectrum, that’s for sure. On a par with basketball Jesus or karate Jesus. Or, sweet Jesus, NASCAR Jesus.

A thump of the tail to NIck Coleman for calling Spot’s attention to the painting.

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