Deadlines come and deadlines go without a taker for the Worst Job on Wall Street. Bank of America’s board of directors is running through CEO candidates faster than Charlie Gasparino goes through creatine, but it doesn’t seem able to take a hint.
Already coming up with precious few names interested in succeeding the inimitable (and, according to the since-silenced Dick Bové, irreplaceable) Ken Lewis, the finely-honed machine that is the BofA board can’t help but drive away the ones it finds who don’t put out press releases making clear they don’t want the goddamned job. When two prospective told the board that Ken’s Kingdom needed to be cut down to size, the board broke out in hives, began sobbing collectively and had security remove the offending presence from the greater Charlotte area.
heads in the sand
“AIG continues to make good on its commitment to pay the American people back,” the one-time insurance giant and current liquidation special’s CEO said today. Its customers may be a different story.
AIG announced that it has reduced its debt to the federal government by $25 billion–it now owes slightly less than $100 billion–giving the New York Fed big preferred stakes in a pair of subsidiaries it plans to sell off in the not-too-distant future. Another piece of AIG is also set to go, with a bid on its way for the insurer’s aviation-leasing business, International Lease Finance Corp.
Peachy. Too bad things are not going as well as planned at the firm’s flagship insurance business, renamed Chartis to help eliminate that awful Hank Greenberg smell. Seems it may be looking at a $12 billion shortfall, which makes AIG’s proclamations of the soundness of its insurance business sound, to this untrained ear, rather like a lie.
The United States may be hurtling headlong into a debt disaster, but that didn’t seem to bother creditors today.
Sure, the national debt now exceeds $12 trillion, and simply servicing that mountain of IOUs is going to cost almost $1 trillion a year in a decade. Still, bidders today drove down the yield on two-year Treasury notes to an all-time low, as though the U.S. isn’t facing a fiscal reckoning of seriously unpleasant proportions.
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