We told him.
And he did not listen.
He had dreams of big bonuses after all.
Well, Angelo's fraudsters ended up blowing up his bank.
Right on schedule.
Nice job Ken.
You went to bed with Angelo Mozilo, and you gave BofA shareholders, and US taxpayers, financial gonorrhea.
What the hell were you thinking?
They called them "Liar's Loans".
Could it have been any more obvious? And how the f*ck do you still have a job?
Lewis’s Merrill, Countrywide Buys May Hurt Him, Bank of America
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp.’s Kenneth Lewis, who used acquisitions to build the lender and his reputation, may have damaged both by pursuing Merrill Lynch & Co. and Countrywide Financial Corp.
The bank, largest in the U.S. by assets, dropped 14 percent in New York trading after Lewis, the company’s chief executive officer for eight years, posted the first quarterly loss since 1991. A new package of support on Jan. 15 from the U.S. totaling $138 billion to help absorb Merrill’s losses didn’t stop the stock’s 16-month slide, raising questions among analysts and investors about the tenure of the 61-year-old Lewis.
“He’s made so many just grossly wrong projections or statements in the public press over the last 18 months,” said Jon Fisher, who manages a $1.5 billion portfolio at Fifth Third Asset Management in Minneapolis that doesn’t include the bank’s shares. “I’m sorry, I don’t think he should have a CEO title if he can’t forecast his own business or he can’t understand his own financials.”
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part of an email I wrote to a friend in mid December, 2008. Prognosticating on the future:
"3. Ken Lewis the CEO of Bank of America (BAC) paid $5.7 bln for Countrywide Financial. I think BAC will end up writing off well over $100 bln of bad CDOs. I thought Gerald Levin former CEO of Time Warner made the biggest business deal blunder in history, when he paid $60 bln for AOL back in the dot bomb days. Without much effort, Ken Lewis will inherit this dubious honor. Meanwhile, John Thain, former CEO of Merill Lynch will make it out like a sly bandit in the darkness of night! BAC after absorbing two financial parasites this past year will ask for at least $400 bln of freshly printed money from the Treasury, thus making the bailout of AIG look small. "
Cinch
obama will never arrest mozilo...
washington will always be curropt
It just doesn't make sense.
Why did he do it?
And why did his board and his shareholders agree to it?
Makes you lost trust in corporate America. Run by monkeys.
When amateurs on a blog are smarter and more in tune than highly paid CEOs and board members, well, then we're f*cked.
And now we're f*cked.
Meanwhile, serious question, how the hell does Ken Lewis still have a job? Do the shareholders have no say?
to Ken Lewis' credit he did try to back out of the last deal and only went thru with it after holding the taxpayer hostage for an add'l $20 billion. so obviously he knows how f'ed he(we) is(are), he just wants the Fed/Treasury/us to have even more skin in his game.
Did you see the $15 Billion in bonuses paid out secretly in December by Merrill. They paid the bonuses earlier this year so it would happen before the merger.
I can't believe no one is making a stink over this one. they essentially used bailout money to pay bonuses!!!!!!
"It just doesn't make sense.
Why did he do it?"
To create one World bank. Do you really think they don't know what they are doing?
In what way can we rise up against these crooks? What can we do to stop this madness? I know we can write our congressmen but it doesn't seem to do any good. We are being robbed.
Are we supposed to feel sorry? Hey lady, I give you $80k for your POS Palm Beach condo, if you throw the plasma TV.
widow's riches-to-rags story
When Maureen Ebel's uncle called her at 10:45 p.m. Dec. 11, she feared a death in the family.
Instead, her Uncle Leonard gave Ebel news of another kind of disaster that would upend her life: New York investment manager Bernard L. Madoff had been charged with massive fraud.
Ebel, 60, a widow who lives outside West Chester and winters near West Palm Beach, thought she had $7.3 million with Madoff.
It became sickeningly clear over the next day or so that all her money was gone. "The thought that I have to work now as long as I can stand up to feed myself" shattered her comfortable world, she said.
Six days after Madoff's arrest for allegedly bilking investors in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, Ebel had a strenuous temporary job caring for a wealthy friend's 93-year-old mother and keeping her house, pushing the vacuum cleaner and ironing.
"The first day, I went home and cried," Ebel said.
"I was married, had a fabulous marriage to a man I loved and worshiped, a physician. We traveled. We had a very fine life."
Selling the two-bedroom condo, which was appraised at $400,000 several years ago, is excruciating because her late husband was so happy there. "It was like a chunk of my husband that I still had," Ebel said.
But if the condo fails to sell in the miserable Florida real estate market, she cannot imagine what will happen.
She has already sold small items to scrape dollars together: a Ping-Pong table from her basement for $400, a painting for $1,500, jewelry for $1,100.
When she got to Florida on Monday to work on selling the condo, she remembered that she could return a $1,300 television to Costco.
Already last month, she returned thousands of dollars of items she had paid for with her American Express card, including a $5,400 set of porch furniture bought Dec. 9, a $5,000 club membership, and a $1,200 pair of earrings.
The first time she went to her local Publix supermarket in Florida after Madoff's fraud came out, she had a new experience picking out cream for her coffee.
Normally she would take whatever she wanted and put it in the cart, not paying much attention to prices on such a small item. But that time, she looked at the price of every single cream until she spotted a two-for-one sale.
http://tinyurl.com/ao4zt3
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THIS ENGINEERED CRISIS WAS CREATED BY DESIGN. EVERYTHING'S GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN. THE BIGGEST HEIST SINCE WWII
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I concur, Countrywide was a very bad decision. Merill Lynch was one of those government arm twisting deals on a Friday. You either take it or we give them to one of your competitors and screw you when you need help.
I just wish the government allowed torture, because Thane needs a good waterboarding session after passing out $4 billion in bonus over the holidays. Hey Thane, you jackass, you do not give bonus' to money managers that lost 20-80% of there clients money.
Akin to marrying a spouse who is riddled with cancer and expecting the future to be rosy for the both of you.
I agree with Guberville, at least in part. By the time that deal went through there was no way that everybody involved didn't know exactly what the score was. Maybe it's about making one world bank, maybe not. But what is certain is that we have not seen everything behind the curtain yet and probably never will. There is some greater, hidden plan here and I don't say that in a NWO kind of way, I mean it may be as simple as the powers that be trying to do the right thing and in the process promising BofA way more than got publicised.
Whatever happened we, the public, have a right to know about it though, but probably never will until we're old and grey and the main players are dead.
I don't know, greed, fraudulence or stupidity? I wish I could summon enough charity to say it was Lewis acted out of stupidity, but it's hard to be that generous anymore.
C'mon folks, sing along: "We are the world, we are the Ponzi..."
Ex-bank manager in Miami Beach accused in $11 million fraud
Ricardo Figueredo, a former employee of Bank of America and Barnett Bank, was charged in federal court with bank fraud in a scheme to misappropriate $11 million from customer accounts between the mid-1990s and 2008.
According to a criminal information filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, Figueredo dealt with customers who lived outside the United States but kept accounts in South Florida. The prosecution alleges he misappropriated more than $11 million in customer funds for personal investments in Guatemala, Spain and elsewhere and used more than $1 million in customer funds ``to support his lavish lifestyle.''
The criminal information alleges he took money from certain customers' accounts to cover interest payments or withdrawals from other customers' accounts.
Lewis picked up some bar chicks that everyone warned him about, and now he is surprised when he wakes up with warts on his lips.
Sometimes the communists have good ideas. In China, the executives get executed when they screw up.
This is too obvious. Ken Lewis can't be that stupid. The BofA / Countrywide thing had to be a shotgun marriage.
In what way can we rise up against these crooks? What can we do to stop this madness? I know we can write our congressmen but it doesn't seem to do any good. We are being robbed.
Well we had recent elections and most every congressman that voted for the bailout got relected. No tto mention Obama and McCain who voted for the bailout.
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