Bank of America Passes 60 Minutes Test…For Now!

Bank of America’s CEO was on 60 Minutes last night with Lesley Stahl interviewing. Now, I didn’t know 60 Minutes started doing infomercials, but Ken Lewis was given 20 minutes to tell us all the good things he has done at the nation’s largest bank. One of which being his claim that come Hell or high water, he was not getting BOA into subprime lending back in 2001 because it was “too risky.” I hope I’m not the only one thinking this, but I am pretty sure we’ve found Nostradamus, and he is alive and well running a $3 trillion bank in North Carolina.

Beyond the accolades

Anyway, Mr. Lewis goes on to say that tempers flared during last week’s meeting between the country’s nine largest banks and Secretary Paulson. It apparently got to the point where the former head of Goldman Sachs threatened to call in a wet team of Navy SEALs to provide group waterboarding lessons to any of the heads of the nine families banks that didn’t take the $25B and put it on the street in the form of loans. But something else was bothering me about the interview besides the heavy petting between Mr. Lewis and Leslie Stahl.

What does $150B & 20% mean?

With all the high fiving and back slapping during the interview it would be easy to overlook the fact that BOA currently has over $150B in credit card exposure which amounts to 20% of revenue. Now, if the credit card market is next to fall as most pundits predict, we will have a new round of bailouts on our hands people. If that’s the case Mr. Lewis, instead of oral from Lesley, it’s going to be Mike Wallace coming out of retirement to give you a good old fashion east coast gangster style ass kicking all the way back to Charlotte.