TCF Coopers, Tony Sutton’s Patrons, Soon To Follow Him Down The Drain?

It looks like TCF is in big trouble financially:

Anecdotally, TCF Bank seems to be struggling — in Uptown, for instance, the bank used to have numerous ATMs, but they’ve all been removed over the last year or so, sometimes replaced with generic machines.

TCF’s fourth-quarter earnings report provides hard data to support that anecdote. It reveals that the bank’s profits more than halved during the fourth quarter of last year compared to the last quarter of 2010.

The City Pages article goes on to mention the possible reasons therefor, the biggest one in reporter Aaron Rupar’s opinion being TCF’s not being able to gouge retailers anymore by charging high fees whenever one of their check cards is used to pay for retail goods. I personally suspect that other forces are at work, namely the spectacular failures of Baja Sol and Cooper State Bank.

I was wondering why TCF pulled almost all of its downtown Minneapolis ATMs a few months ago. The only ones I know of are in the IRS Center on the second floor (skyway) level) — and even those have been cut back from three to two when they were replaced with generic machines recently. TCF’s Express Teller ATMs have — up to now — been a part of the Twin Cities landscape for over twenty years. The only reason I could think of for their disappearance was big-time financial trouble on TCF’s part. And sure enough, the latest financials show that.

I suspect that Tony Sutton’s (former?) patrons, the TCF Coopers are about to lose their position as the 800-pound gorillas of Minnesota Republican politics — if they haven’t lost it already. Is this why the evangelical Emmer-Quist crowd, with backing from Primera’s Bob Cummins, seems to be ascendant again barely a year after Emmer’s defeat in a race that Sutton ally Marty Seifert would likely have won?

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