As Hugh McColl built North Carolina National Bank into NCNB into Nationsbank into Bank of America, Ken Lewis was the guy who made all those mergers work. McColl was the swashbuckler, Lewis the beancounter. From a 2005 profile in by Fortune by Shawn Tully:
Lewis’s cool restraint impressed McColl. “He always had good credit judgment,” says
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My colleague Steve Gandel has a nice piece about the strange contortions the FDIC is now going through to avoid tapping its credit line with the U.S. Treasury. He writes:
The agency has a credit line with the Treasury to tap as much as $500 billion in emergency capital through the end of next year. But the FDIC is worried that if the
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It was a year ago today that the Dow fell 777.68 points in reaction to the House rejecting version 1.0 of the bank bailout plan.
That was the biggest point drop ever, although in percentage terms it didn’t even make the top 10. It was also, in retrospect, a reasonable (if a bit sudden) reassessment of the prospects for corporate …
One positive byproduct of this real estate/financial crisis has been the elevation of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices to the status of standard measure of housing prices and the relegation of the National Association of Realtors’ average and median sales price numbers to sideshow. This is mostly a good thing, because the NAR …
Rudy Provoost, the CEO of Philips Lighting, was here Friday. There’d been a big, goofy photo of him, lightbulb in hand, in Friday’s NYT business section (the photo does not appear to be online, although the story it accompanied is) so I figured the Curious Capitalist ought to have its own version.
Provoost is holding an LED lightbulb …
Sometime today, the G20 will be declared to have supplanted the G8 as the “permanent council for international economic cooperation.” Yay, G20! Having international economic confabs that didn’t include Brazil or India or China no longer made any sense. Then again, having a UN Security Council where France and the UK have veto power and …
I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with the cover story on Detroit. It’s about bonds.
Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil has an uncharacteristically boneheaded column about the FDIC’s money troubles. He begins:
The FDIC’s insurance fund is going broke, and Sheila Bair is wondering aloud about how to replenish it. This means one thing for taxpayers: Watch your wallets.
I learned about the column from FT Alphaville, which notes …
Fortune’s Jon Fortt reports that when long-time Microsoft-basher Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle) was asked this week if Microsoft was still relevant, his answer was:
They make a lot of money. I think they’re clearly relevant. I divide the computer industry into two groups. And I know for a long time I was constantly picking a fight
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In today’s FT, Martin Wolf writes about China’s $2.1 trillion in foreign currency reserves:
It is little wonder such a huge exposure makes the Chinese government nervous. But nobody asked the Chinese to do this. On the contrary, US policymakers have consistently (and wisely) advised them to do the opposite. Having made what I believe was
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I was sitting in the park across the street from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business this morning, after a visit with Steve Levitt and before a lunch date with Dick Thaler. (Am I a friggin’ econonamedropper or what?) At least, I was trying to sit there and answer some e-mails, but every time I stayed more than about two …
You probably know the bare-bones history of the personal computer: The business was IBM’s to dominate, but it decided to outsource the guts of the machine—the microprocessor and the operating system—to Intel and Microsoft. Those two companies sucked up most of the profits of the 1990s PC boom, while Dell became the dominant PC …
