Old timers: what was it like during GFC?

Damn that title hurts... when did I become an old timer? Not a HF'er and not related to volatility, but still may be of interest to some. I did get started in 2008 but on the commercial banking side of things (Main Street regional, not a money-center bank). My recollections:

• Things were happening so fast and information had a much lower velocity than it does now it's hard to even imagine but print newspapers were still among the primary means that people got their news in the morning. Blackberries with physical keyboards were still the pinnacle of mobile phones at this time.
  • The other comment above about ATMs not working is not an exaggeration.
• On the commercial banking end of the spectrum, the reaction was much more delayed because things moved slower.
  • At our bank, there was actually a lot of open glee at seeing these fancy Wall Street types get their comeuppance for having taken such huge amounts of risk and enjoying the profits but then complaining about the losses.
  • Think your staid banker in a starched white shirt thinking they know all about how the capital markets worked but just didn't want to dirty their hands with that type of stuff because they were just humble servants for their loyal customers.
  • I heard executives say that our bank was fine because they purposefully didn't get involved in all those fancy products so it would just be business as usual and for us not to worry about it.
• Without revealing the name of the bank, suffice to say that our executive team said they were forced to accept the TARP money and that they didn't want it, didn't need it, but were told in no uncertain terms it was not optional.
  • In early 2009, they even continued the years-long tradition of increasing the dividend when they reported Q4-2008 results only to promptly then cut the dividend by 75% and make statements that completely contradicted those they made in the earnings release. The writing was on the wall.
• In mid-2009, one of our risk management EVPs (but not in the C-suite) apparently (I was not there so heard this second-hand) made a big stink to the regulators when they showed up about how things had been done a certain way for a long time and it was highly effective given that contagion hadn't hit our portfolio, etc etc and (again, I'm told) physically barred the door to some regulators because he found them to be intolerable and overbearing. He announced his immediate retirement less than 30 days later and that department began to undergo an ENORMOUS re-organization and expansion in response to a very detailed letter the bank received from regulators. The guy named as interim chief of the department came from another part of the bank so he wouldn't have any baggage about doing things differently.
  • Reading between the lines, I think it stopped short of being an MOU or MRA due to the strong historical relationship with the regulator; but there could be no mistaking that they wanted things to change. A lot. And fast.
• About mid-2009, the contagion finally did catch up to our Main Street portfolio and while it was a slower burn that on Wall Street, it was just a wide in breadth and just as devastating.
  • When commercial loans go bad; it's not like you just mark them to market and take a beating right away with increased collateral being posted to your counterparty or getting your P&L blown apart... it is a much slower process that involves many more human beings.
  • At this point, we still had real Old Timers that thought "We are taking a lot of losses now as things are written down, but that's just due to the depressed valuations on underlying collateral (ie: real estate). I bet if you measure the amount of losses for 2008-2010 and watch, you'll see a high amount of recoveries in 2011+ as we take possession of this collateral and work it out of the bank."
    • Spoiler: No.
• The game from late-2009 through mid-2010 was containing the damage and, once it was realized these were problems endemic to the slow economy, ejecting the dead parts as quickly as possible.
• I'd say by 2011 it was mostly back to business-as-usual, except that the "as usual" part has never been the same as it was pre-2008. We just weren't holding back the barbarians at the gate by this time and went about trying to add new loans to offset all the bad ones that were either contained or had been chopped off.

Today is nothing like 2008/2009. Absent some kind of exogenous shock, I don't see today becoming that bad, either. Hopefully.