The list of things that can be done in national interest appears to grow longer every day. While in India it can be used for anything from destroying working class housing to build stadiums to destroying tribal communities to build dams, to torturing, illegally detaining, and killing innocents under false pretences; in the US, officials and executives are coming to terms with how to deal with an “economic emergency”.
As information on Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch begins to trickle through the American financial press; news of Merrill’s larger than expected losses seems to have taken some of the sheen of BoA Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis’s knight in shining armour costume.
As reported by Reuters on Jan 16th, shareholders at BofA believe that, at $19.4 billion, Lewis not only overpaid for Merill Lynch; but Merrill’s staggering $15.3 billion dollar loss suggests that he did not do his homework on the deal. As Dennis K. Berman notes in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, the murkiness surrounding the deal has meant that “in the past five trading days, Bank of America’s market capitalisation has dropped 45 %, wiping away a sum greater than the Merrill transaction itself.”
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 