Isakson Meets with FDIC Chairman, Georgia Bankers

Apr 08, 2010

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator and Senate candidate Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., met with FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair and more than 20 bankers from across the state during a meeting in Atlanta on Wednesday.

Isakson, along with U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., organized the hour-long meeting to give members of Georgia’s banking community the opportunity to meet with Bair and ask questions regarding the real estate marketplace, FDIC regulatory policies and capital markets.

“We had a good dialogue for these difficult times,” Isakson said. “I appreciate Chairman Bair taking the time to meet with Georgia’s bankers so she could hear firsthand about the tough challenges they are facing.”

During the meeting, Isakson expressed concern that mark-to-market accounting rules are disproportionately penalizing the people they serve. Given the declines our nation has seen in the mortgage-backed securities and in real estate, mark-to-market has caused tremendous problems for our nation’s banks. Isakson believes mark-to-market rules should be replaced with a mechanism of amortization or “smoothing” to absorb the assets over time. This would allow the absorption of those assets over time to be more reflective of reality and less reflective of the dire economic straits that our nation faces today.