Bank of America changes the guard
Bank of America, the giant of American lending, is replacing former CEO Kenneth Lewis with Brian Moynihan after the bank’s hugely controversial takeover of Merrill Lynch. Lewis is heading for retirement, just as soon as he has finished testifying to angry congressional committees about what the Merrill deal actually meant. Moynihan headed up the consumer banking unit, and will take over at the end of the year. Bank of America posted two big losses in the past four quarters, so Moynihan has a lot to do. The bank has now paid back $45 billion of taxpayers’ money to the US Troubled Asset Relief Programme, one of the last big borrowers to do so. It has some 53 million consumers and small-businesses as customers across the world, having grown under Lewis from a parochial North Carolina entity into a global giant in 10 years. It was the speed of growth that gave it huge amounts of flab, much of which disappeared almost overnight when markets crashed in 2008 leaving huge debt holes in their wake. Read more: Business Week
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