When Paul Hudson, the chairman and CEO of Broadway Federal Bank in Los Angeles, speaks of the current financial crisis, he sounds altogether placid.

“It’s going to be difficult, because everybody participated in this low-cost-credit, high-value-asset scenario,” he says. “But I’m not overly stressed.” It helps that his own bank is doing fine.

Broadway Federal’s story isn’t exceptional. Easily overlooked amid the crisis of big banks today, small-scale financial institutions are, for the most part, holding steady,and sometimes even better than steady. One reason community banks are doing so well right now is simply that they never became too clever for their own good.

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