“The better answer is not a revised Hagerty-Alsobrooks bill. It is restoring the Transaction Account Guarantee program, or TAG, which ran from 2008 to 2012. It allowed banks to offer unlimited backing for non-transaction accounts, but only on a temporary basis.“That is TAG’s one great virtue over Hagerty-Alsobrooks: It is not permanent. It is an emergency tool designed to stop panic-driven deposit flight during a crisis, not an irreversible expansion of the federal safety net.”– Preston Kennedy, vice chairman of Zachary Bancshares, and Noah W. Wilcox, president, CEO and chairman of Grand Rapids State Bank and Wilcox Bancshares
Read the full op-ed here: Even amended, the Hagerty-Alsobrooks bill remains the wrong answer
By Preston Kennedy and Noah W. Wilcox
American Banker
April 27, 2026
A few months ago, we argued that the Hagerty-Alsobrooks deposit insurance bill was being sold as a gift to community banks when it was really a gift to credit unions.
The sponsors have now revised the bill, cutting the proposed special deposit insurance cap for noninterest-bearing transaction accounts from a 40-fold increase over today’s $250,000 limit to a potential 20-fold increase, or up to $5 million. But reducing the number does not fix the underlying problem. The revised bill still gives credit unions a new government-backed opening into business, nonprofit and municipal accounts they have not historically occupied at scale. And the bill still worsens the already uneven playing field between tax-exempt credit unions and community banks.
Read the full op-ed here: Even amended, the Hagerty-Alsobrooks bill remains the wrong answer
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