The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has released a study of community development credit unions and their impact on community development finance during the recent economic downturn which the study calls the Great Recession.
The study's author is Clifford Rosenthal, the current CEO of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Union who has announced he will step down from that post in May to take a position with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“In the study, Rosenthal introduces the broader credit union movement to the world of community development finance and identifies factors that have limited the recognition of credit unions within the CDFI field,” the National Federation wrote when announcing the study's release.
One consequence of this limited recognition, Rosenthal noted, is disproportionately low levels of financial and technical support for CDCUs and other depositories compared to non-regulated loan funds, which regularly claim 75-85% of direct assistance from the Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
Rosenthal was one of the key people involved in the creation of the CDFI Fund.
