Some boards function as little more than an audience for management while others serve the institution as a true asset. Here’s how you can tell the difference.

To start out the year, I’d like to both properly memorialize the late, great Alex Trebek and provide some helpful suggestions for investment management in this challenging rate environment in which we find ourselves. And I’d like to do it in the space of this column, so let’s pick up our signaling devices and see what answers we have in front of us.

SRM founder and principal Brad Stevens has been leading the credit industry as an analyst, trainer and consultant for over 30 years. Read Brad's Economic Update for Bank Directors.

Banks are looking ahead to this year with the hope that the human and economic toll of 2020 can be left in the past.

Over time, a business relationship develops, much of which is a matter of convenience for the busy portfolio manager. And out of this relationship comes dialogue. In 2020, the dialogue has gone places it had not yet visited. So, as the year ends, and hopefully the COVID-19-dominated headlines begin to recede, ICBA Securities' Jim Reber recounts some questions and comments he's heard for the first time this year.

On Nov. 18, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued Revenue Ruling 2020-27 and Revenue Procedure 2020-51. This guidance collectively addresses the timing of the disallowance of deduction of eligible costs incurred during 2020 that were paid using proceeds from a loan guaranteed under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

As 2020 comes to an end, here are a couple of items to consider within the economy that might be important.

For all that 2020 hasn’t been, let’s look at what it has. In fact, let’s make COVID a magic word and see what happens to our perspective.