Can Brian Moynihan Save Bank of America?

By Paul M. Barrett and Dawn Kopecki

Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg

On the afternoon of Aug. 23, Gary G. Lynch, the global chief of legal, compliance, and regulatory relations for Bank of America, was attending a meeting in Washington when the floor heaved. Although Lynch, a lanky 61-year-old attorney with swept-back white hair, had never experienced an earthquake, he possessed the good sense to get beneath a sturdy conference table, along with several other people. “If the ceiling came down,” he recalls, “I thought we were dead.”

The ceiling held, despite the magnitude 5.8 quake rippling from its epicenter in Virginia. Minutes later, Lynch pulled out his BlackBerry and discovered another startling development: a rumor rattling Wall Street that Bank of America might get swept into an involuntary, government-orchestrated rescue by its smaller rival JPMorgan Chase. “This is really getting nuts,” he thought.

Lynch, who as the head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission in the late 1980s brought Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken to heel, knew he’d come under heavy fire when he parachuted into BofA this July. His assignment: Defend against a seemingly endless barrage of multibillion-dollar lawsuits and government investigations concerning defective mortgage-backed bonds manufactured at the height of the real estate bubble. No sooner did one liability bomb explode than it was followed by another. Now Lynch was doing duck-and-cover for real, while the bank’s share price was pounded to within a whisker of $6, down more than 50 percent since Jan. 1. The wild speculation about a forced merger combined ominously with financial analyst chatter that the mortgage onslaught would drain BofA’s capital, requiring it to sell more stock in desperation. Would Bank of America, which just weeks earlier had reported a record second-quarter loss of $8.8 billion, go the way of Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers?

It was starting to smell like 2008. Hotshot BofA investment bankers gaped at $14 restricted stock units, granted in 2010 and early 2011, which on paper had lost half of their value. They began thumbing smartphones for contact info of potential alternative employers. Managers interrupted vacations to rush into the office and calm valuable dealmakers.

Calm of a temporary sort returned two days later, thanks to a theatrical Buffett-ex-machina intervention. Three years ago, Bear was sold for scrap, while Lehman was allowed to collapse into bankruptcy, setting off a global financial crisis and recession. Announced on Aug. 25, Buffett’s purchase of $5 billion in BofA preferred stock—on typical only-for-Warren terms, including a $300 million annual dividend—allowed the bank to edge back from the abyss, much as Buffett’s $5 billion vote of confidence arrested a run on Goldman Sachs stock in 2008. On Sept. 6, only hours after he sat for an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, BofA Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan grabbed attention again by reshuffling his management ranks, elevating a pair of new co-chief operating officers and ousting Sallie Krawcheck, the high-profile head of wealth management. After all the excitement, the bank’s shares were up 19 percent from their nadir.

For now, Bank of America will not go the way of Lehman or Bear. It has $400 billion in cash and liquid investments and, more important, with $2.3 trillion in assets, it exemplifies the sorry concept of “too big to fail.” No matter what anyone says to the contrary, the U.S. government cannot afford to allow a financial institution of that size to go down and drag the rest of the country with it. BofA’s difficulties are too complex, however, to be solved by Buffett swashbuckling, executive replacements, or the retention of a really sharp lawyer. America’s biggest bank is inextricably intertwined with a still-debilitated U.S. housing market and an unemployment rate stuck painfully above 9 percent.

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Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs

Robyn Twomey

By Andy Grove

Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto (Calif.) restaurant introduced me to his companions, three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I've lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Not this time. I left the restaurant unsettled. Something did not add up. Bay Area unemployment is even higher than the 9.7 percent national average. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn't been creating many jobs of late—unless you're counting Asia, where American tech companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn't simply lower Asian costs. It's our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.

I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968 two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel (INTC), making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories, hire, train, and retain employees, establish relationships with suppliers, and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later the company went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.

Not far from Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., other companies developed. Tandem Computers went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems, Cisco (CSCO), Netscape, and on and on. Some companies died along the way or were absorbed by others, but each survivor added to the complex technological ecosystem that came to be called Silicon Valley.

As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S. China opened up. American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975 (figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony (SNE) (figure-C).

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Paul Farrell's 7 Reasons Why America Needs A "Good Depression" Now...Or Face A Great Depression Later

1: Capitalism’s now a lethal soul sickness, needs a reawakening

What’s the real problem? Not the economy, not markets, nor even politics. Yes, our economic pains are real. But they’re just symptoms. Something’s structural wrong. Since 2000 endless bad news: Greed, deceit, stupidity, corruption, unethical behavior, lack of moral conscience.

The real problem’s deep in our character, the “mutant capitalism” Jack Bogle warned of in “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” Sadly, that battle was lost. With it we lost our soul, our moral compass. America’s character is measured by our net worth.

2. We’re already in the early stages of a Great Depression

Comparing today with the Great Depression is common sport. In a Newsweek special “Seeing Shades of the 1930s,” Dan Gross wrote: “Wall Street, after two terms of a business-friendly Republican president, self-immolated on a pyre of greed, incompetence and excessive optimism.” Today’s “new normal” economy means high unemployment for years, inflation driving prices, rising interest rates, more debt, chaos.

We are destroying ourselves from within. Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker warns that “there are striking similarities between America’s current situation and that of another great power from the past: Rome.” Three reasons “worth remembering: declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.” We are becoming more vulnerable to external enemies.

3. Good Depression exposes our self-destruct bubble-thinking

Before the 2008 crash, “Irrational Exuberance” author Robert Shiller warned in the Atlantic magazine that “bubbles are primarily social phenomena. Until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming.” Housing inflated 85% in the decade: “Historically unprecedented … no rational basis for it.”

Bubble thinking is an toxic virus that infected everyone. Shiller warns of another coming: “We recently lived through two epidemics of excessive financial optimism … we are close to a third episode.”

4. Good Depression will stir outrage, force real reforms

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jim Grant, editor of the Interest Rate Observer, wrote: “Why No Outrage? Through history, outrageous financial behavior has been met with outrage. But today Wall Street’s damaging recklessness has been met with near-silence, from a too tolerant populace.” Grant worries that Wall Street will run “itself and the rest of the American financial system right over a cliff.”

But we only went to the edge in 2008. Today, a rebellious “throw the bums out” hostility is blowing a new kind of bubble: Three years ago we did not have Tea Party, union fights, the Arab Spring and Greek austerity riots, all signs of an dark angry future sweeping across America.

5. Good Depression forces Wall Street to think outside the box

In a powerful Bloomberg Markets feature, “No Easy Fix,” we’re told Wall Street’s “profit formula has hit a wall.” Their “money-making machine is broken and efforts to repair it after the biggest losses in history are likely to undermine profits.”

Even Mad Money’s Jim Cramer openly admits hedge fund managers are pocketing megaprofits at capital gains rates while laughing at the stupidity of a broken political system that gives hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the richest, then takes taxes off the table as our middle class is dying under massive unsustainable deficits. Soon angry mobs will “fix” Wall Street.

6. Good Depression will deflate America’s warring soul

The American economy is a “war economy” driven by a egomaniac. I saw it firsthand as a U.S. Marine. Americans love being king of the hill, world’s cop, the global superpower. Why else spend 54% of our tax dollars on a war machine, 47% of the world’s total military budgets.

Why? Our war machine generates such “spectacular profits that many people around the world” are convinced America’s “rich and powerful must be deliberately causing catastrophes so that they can exploit them,” warns Klein in “Shock Doctrine.” No wonder the GOP takes military spending, like tax cuts for the rich, off-the-table: The war industry is a major political donor.

7. Good Depression now … avoids a far bigger depression later

In “The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars,” Robert Hormats, undersecretary of state and a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, traces America’s wartime financing from the Revolutionary War to present wars. He warns that today we’re “relying on faith over experience, hoping that sustained growth will erase deficits and that the ballooning costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be manageable in the coming decades without difficult reforms.”

Absent a brutal reset, we are on a historically predictable course says Kevin Phillips, Nixon strategist and author of “Wealth & Democracy:” “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.” Yes, burned out, unprepared.

So pray for a Good Depression earlier rather than later. Choose now and we can be prepared for whatever comes. Or a Great Depression will hit later, when we’re least prepared, the problems bigger, our faith weaker … don’t raise the debt ceiling.

Totally predictable: No Black Swans in 2000, 2008 … nor in 2012

Yes, all was predictable: The events of the past few years were well known in advance. In fact, the events of the entire decade were predictable. The rich got richer off the backs of the middle class and the poor. Why? “There’s class warfare all right,” warns Warren Buffett. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

And they are also blind and deaf to the havoc their free-market Reaganomics policies are creating, selfishly undermining America, the world’s greatest economic power.

Lessons learned? Zero. Why? Wall Street, Washington and Corporate America are focused on one narrow-minded short-term strategy: Economic g-r-o-w-t-h, bull markets, megabonuses, tax cuts. In good times they tout “free markets.” But when greed bombs, they throw free-market “principles” under the Reagan Revolution bus and unleash their mercenary lobbyists to go whining to Congress for huge taxpayer bailouts and access at the Fed discount window, to siphon off more taxpayer money. And they’ll do it again soon,

Wall Street and their cronies are doing such a miserable job, America needs a new strategy: First, stop “kicking the can down the road.” Let a good old-fashioned Good Depression do the job that our hapless, happy-talking leaders refuse to do. Take our medicine. Let a new depression clean house and reawaken Americans to core values.

Trust me folks, it’s either a Good Depression now … or a Great Depression 2.

Absolutely spot on. Yet it will be completely ignored - the status quo's steamroller will not be denied: after all just think of all those insolvent entitlement and cheap, cheap credit that Joe Sixpack stands to lose if July 4th was a day of true independence from debt slavery...

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