Bank of America CEO: We can make it thru downturn alone. Problem is: BofA got INTO downturn on its own, by leveraging its lending 32x each dollar it had in the bank
Nationalization is a strange, new concept for me, so I agree with ‘going slow, taking all ideas into consideration’ before going that route.
However, here’s how leveraged BofA is, (TED talk by Juan Enriquez: Beyond the Crisis):
And BofA’s CEO thinks (after taking $45 billion in our tax dollars/federal funds) he can stoicly go it alone and fix his bank.
Problem is:
He’s had all this time to do it and GUESS WHAT? His bank is a huge part of the problem. Why trust an unqualified plumber to keep putting pipes into your home if he’s already mis-connected things and your kitchen sink is spewing sewage?
These guys had their chance. They are so dangerously over-leveraged that the whole world waits to see the collapse of banking.
And yet they blame the individual homeowners, for daring to buy with loans given to them by banks. The bible says don’t point out the cinder in your brother’s eye when you have a 2×4 in your own.
Its not the home mortgages, its the excess leverage. Excess leverage means NO MONEY IS IN THE BANK. Rick Santelli is WRONG, its not the couple hundred bucks you are now being asked to pay to cover some ‘dummy’s’ excess mortgage, its the banks’ stupidity at lending out $32 for one dollar it has in its coffers.
And this CEO let Merrill’s CEO pre-pay bonuses before the merger, saying ‘we strongly advised against but couldn’t stop’ Merrill.
NEW YORK, Feb. 11, 2009 (Reuters) — Merrill Lynch “secretly” accelerated bonus payments last year and gave at least $1 million to each of nearly 700 employees, even as the brokerage was amassing billions of dollars in losses, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a letter to U.S. Rep. Barney Frank.
This is the cat who wants us to let him run the show, alone, unsupervised?
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