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The Baker Group and Texas Community Banks: 30-years and Going Strong

By Jeff Caughron

For nearly a third of a century, the Baker Group has been a partner with community banks in Texas as they’ve navigated through some fascinating and often challenging times. When the firm was started in 1979, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker launched an unprecedented tight money campaign in order to fight inflation which reached 13.3% in December of that year. The banking industry was coping with enormous change as deregulation and an explosion of new financial products forced bankers to rethink the way they did business. Meanwhile, the price of crude oil skyrocketed in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and suddenly interest rate volatility soared. In the midst of all this turmoil, the Baker Group (then called James Baker & Company) began to help Texas community bankers adapt to the changes through the use of a new concept called “Asset / Liability Management”, which was the title of Dr. James Baker’s best-selling book on managing interest rate risk, published that same year . . . Read More.

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