The ride that the stock market has given us over the past weeks has had all the thrills of a great theme park roller coaster. It started with the slow tick, tick, tick as our political leaders did little to resolve the debt problem. Then we had quick and furious drop after the S&P downgrade. You couple this with a wonderful quick bounce back up, followed by a rapid decline followed by some sharp right and left hand turns. The parents are about to toss in their cookies and the kids are smiling with their hands up in the air. The ride still has a while to run, but this is all that it is, and it is a temporary wild ride.

No doubt many members are looking to get out of the market for the safety of an interest rate deposit at their friendly credit unions. Actually, even at the very low rates that credit unions have paid for deposit accounts, credit unions may actually be doing members harm by encouraging them to jump off the roller coaster of the market into a deposit IRA account. I never consider leaving the comforts of a roller coaster car mid-ride.

One should question whether credit unions are doing the right thing by continuing to payout out excessive dividends in light of the Federal Reserve's announcement that it will keep the fed funds rate at close to zero into 2013. Credit unions have a true asset-liability management problem if they are overpaying for CD's without proper loan demand. The investment options going forward are just not there to justify attracting hot money. A major weakness and threat to a credit union's future is the bias of elderly board members. They may be mispricing dividends rates because they are voting with their pocket books.