While the agricultural sector continues to face numerous challenges, “there’s a lot of optimism” among ag lenders looking ahead to the next 12 months, ABA Chief Economist James Chessen said in an interview today with RFD-TV’s “Market Day Report” program.
With the farm economy in the midst of a prolonged downturn, the primary concern among ag lenders in 2019 was credit quality and the deterioration of agricultural loans, according to the latest agricultural lenders survey conducted by the American Bankers Association and Farmer Mac.
The United States Department of Agriculture today issued a long-awaited interim final rule establishing new regulations and procedures for the legal production of industrial hemp, as required by the 2018 Farm Bill.
The FCS, America’s least known government-sponsored-enterprise, has an excessively complex and increasingly obsolete organizational structure. … Simplifying the structure of the FCS would improve its operating efficiency, which presumably would benefit its member/borrowers, while strengthening the FCA’s safety-and-soundness regulation of the FCS.
The American Bankers Association has announced the recipients of both the Bruning and Blanchfield Awards, the association’s premier awards presented for contributions to ag banking.
As it marks its centennial, North Dakota’s public bank does its work through private-sector partnerships.
The American Bankers Association today urged lawmakers not to vote for a bill that would significantly raise the current debt limit for Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings.
In a comment letter sent today, ABA warned the House Judiciary Committee of the unintended consequences of raising the current debt limit for Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings from approximately $4.3 million to $10 million.
A proposed change to Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Code could have adverse effects for the nation’s agricultural producers, the American Bankers Association said in a statement for the record in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing held today.
As bankers know all too well, farmers and ranchers are suffering from a sustained period of low commodity prices, rising input costs, heavy rains and flooding, and more recently, trade issues that are harming agricultural exports. Not surprising, those factors have hurt farm income, which peaked in 2013. As in past cycles, sustained declines in farm income lead to increased cash-flow problems for farmers and ranchers, which in turn lead to rising credit-quality problems for ag lenders. Even though the FCS focuses on lending to financially stronger farmers, a key question is how well the FCS is acknowledging growing credit-quality problems in its loan portfolio and/or shedding weaker credits by calling loans and not renewing lines of credit.