Abacus Federal Savings Bank

Abacus Federal Savings Bank (國寶銀行) is a Chinese American bank in the United States founded in December 1984 by a group of business leaders from the Chinese community in New York City. The founders' original purpose was to provide banking services to immigrants and local residents of lower Manhattan. As the Chinese immigrant population grew in the 1980s and 1990s, the bank retained its original mission, but expanded its size and scope. It now has six branches covering New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Besides the traditional banking services, it also offers insurance and securities through its subsidiaries. Abacus is federally chartered. Its mortgage and other services extend to all states in the United States.^[1]

Abacus has a wholly owned insurance subsidiary, the Abacus Insurance Agency Corp. (AIAC), which provides life, health, accident and annuity insurance.^[1]

In May 2012, New York prosecutors indicted the bank and 19 of its employees on charges of fraud in relation to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of mortgages that had been sold to Fannie Mae between 2005 and 2010. The bank was accused of falsifying loan applications so that borrowers would qualify for mortgages.^[2] Abacus has said that it uncovered the improper behavior itself, reported it to the regulator, and fired the employee in question. It also said it was not involved with the fraudulent packaging of subprime mortgage securities and had a mortgage default rate of 0.5%, a tenth of the national average.^[3]

The unreasonableness of the prosecution, in light of the “too-big-to-fail” passes that have been provided to large banks, has been documented in the media. ^[4][5][6][7]

References

Further reading

• Taibbi, Matt (2014). "Unintended Consequences" The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 978-0-8129-9342-4. pp. 3-51.