BofA CEO: Finance Industry Recovery Slow

Lewis Says Economy Is Improving But Banks Remain "Very Fragile" in the Early Stages of Recovery

(AP)  Bank of America Corp.'s outgoing CEO Ken Lewis said Tuesday that the U.S. economy may be improving but the recovery in the financial industry remains slow.

In what may be his last address to analysts, Lewis said at a conference in New York that Bank of America and other banks continue to be under great pressure.

"If we are seeing the beginnings of a real, sustainable recovery, it is still in its very early stages and is still very fragile," he said. "But the economic signs as I read them give us reason to believe that we may be on the path to better days."

Speaking for only 25 minutes and not accepting questions from the audience, Lewis spent most of his presentation talking about the bank's performance in the first nine months of the year.

He said the bank's integration of Merrill Lynch & Co. is ahead of schedule and will generate more expense savings in 2009 than originally forecast. Bank of America has produced $2.2 billion in cost savings related to the Merrill acquisition through Sept. 30, he said.

Bank of America is among hundreds of banks that have received government support through the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The bank received $25 billion as part of the initial round of investments when the credit crisis peaked last fall. It then received an additional $20 billion in January shortly after it acquired Merrill Lynch in what was a heavily scrutinized deal.

Lewis, who is retiring at year's end, is believed to have decided to leave the bank because of the strife that has surrounded BofA since the Merrill Lynch deal closed.

Bank of America, based in Charlotte, is searching for his replacement and said Monday it could be announced by late November.

Shares of Bank of America rose 21 cents to $15.98 in morning trading Tuesday.

[taxpayingvoter]

this Mega-Moron Lewis said that the banks are still too fragil, but then they want to give their criminal employees huge bonuses. If thery were so fragile a normal person would not reach into the money bag and remove such huge sums to satiate their egos. They have lied so much about everything, can we trust them when they say anything now? I hope that we are not that stupid. I like how his comments were peppered with, maybe's and not conclusive data. Just more lies from another harvard graduate. I hear that harvard has opened a new college just for CEO's. It is the harvard school of theft and corruption, with a minor study in lying.

[us_1776]

The big banks are 100% to blame for the entire collapse of the housing market.

They funded massive overdevelopment of real estate that generated enormous amounts of housing supply that eventually overwhelmed demand and crashed housing prices. And demographers and others were warning that there was no justification for all this massive real estate development. And the banks did all this in the name of greed. They saw all those lucrative mortgages that they would be able to write on all that real estate development that they were funding. And then they engaged in mortgage fraud through perverse volume incentives to mortgage brokers both internal and external and wrote mortgages to just about anyone without regard to qualifications. And this involved not just subprime mortgages but all categories of mortgages.

The big banks are single-handedly responsible for the mortgage crisis, the housing crisis, the economic crisis and the resulting economic disaster that has happened to so many people.

[Henri_Rochard]

Ken, don't let the door hit you on the derriere on the way out. Good riddance.

How many thousands of Bank employees were laid off as a result of your ego ???