SEPTEMBER 3, 2015 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY RICHARD NEWMAN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Stewardship Financial Corp. of Midland Park is the latest northern New Jersey bank to raise millions of dollars from investors to repay capital provided by the U.S. government to spur lending after the most recent recession.
The parent of 30-year-old Atlantic Stewardship Bank said late Friday that it raised $16.6 million to replace $15 million in funding received in 2011 from the U.S. Treasury through the Small Business Lending Fund, which was part of the Small Business Jobs Act signed into law by President Obama in September 2010.
The program gave banks with less than $10 billion in assets an incentive to make loans to businesses with less than $50 million in annual sales. The more loans they made, the less they had to pay to the government in dividends. The kinds of loans that qualify include commercial and industrial loans and owner-occupied commercial real estate loans.
Many banks, including Atlantic Stewardship, used the money to replace the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. The participating banks have been making quarterly dividend payments to the Treasury at an annual rate of as low as 1 percent or as high as 5 percent of the amount of the government’s investment, depending on the amount of small-business loans the banks make.
As of March 31, the total increase in small-business lending since the program began amounted to $16.4 billion, according to a Treasury survey of participants.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/stewardship-financial-repaying-u-s-1.1403175
This is a complete joke….this bank accepted both TARP and SBLF to stay alive after very poor management and lending decisions. If they were in any type of a reasonable footing going all the way back to TARP funding they would have never needed it having been able to raise capital on their own. they should have been forced to close or merge with another more stable institution and not mooching off the taxpayers.