Good night, sweet prince.They did it! With two whole weeks to spare, Bank of America’s fractious, barely-functional board of directors managed to hire a CEO. Congratulations, Brian Moynihan, on being handed the Worst Job on Wall Street in the great “don’t pick me” sweepstakes.
But now is not the time to discuss the unanimous selection–through gritted teeth, we must imagine–of one of the only guys who wanted the job and of one of the guys the board desperately didn’t want to hire. That could not have been made more clear. While Moynihan and other insiders–condolences, Greg Curl, and best of luck finding another dysfunctional bank to work at–threw themselves at the board, hoping for a little action, the board held out for something sexier. Well, 4 A.M. came before she did, I guess.
Worst Job on Wall Street
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.
In Spite Of Being The Worst Job On Wall Street, BofA CEO Is Actually The Best Job In Finance
By John Shazar
The luckiest man on earthHere at Dealbreaker, our opinion of Bank of America is pretty clear. The company is a dysfunctional mess and, despite being the biggest bank in the country, can’t seem to find anyone interested in taking its top job.
Those incorrigible contrarians at Breakingviews have a different take on the Worst Job on Wall Street.
There may actually be no better job in finance than the hot-seat of BofA.
Interesting. Go on.
Regulators are hardly friendly with BofA or Ken Lewis, its outgoing chief. Its board needs an overhaul, a senior management team of big shots is already in place, and there’s huge work to be done integrating its many poorly-timed acquisitions.
Right. And, now, the upside:
The CEO of GMAC Financial Services (a joint-venture of the United States government) has been forced to resign on the eve of the company’s third recourse to taxpayer money.
Alvaro de Molina resigned at the request of GMAC Financial’s board of directors due to “mounting concerns in recent weeks about his leadership and his vision for the company,” The Wall Street Journal reports. It also notes that de Molina totally did not see it coming. The mutiny came at noon today.
Despite running the company for more than a year and a half, de Molina wasn’t exactly best friends with anyone on the board: It got an extreme makeover in May after GMAC Financial got a second round of federal money. Two of the company’s directors are Treasury appointees; he apparently had even lost the support of the guy who got him the job, Cerberus Capital Management chief Stephen Feinberg, whose private equity firm continues to own 22% of GMAC Financial. Feinberg was apparently none too pleased when de Molina moved to make the lender a bank-holding company, which resulted in a serious diminution of Cerberus’ control over GMAC Financial.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of years for Citigroup. But a couple of the world’s biggest hedge fund managers seem to think Vikram and Co. have something going.
Paulson & Co. bought up a $1.2 billion stake in Citi during the third quarter, while Renaissance Technologies took a more modest $90 million slice. RenTech has been somewhat schizophrenic about Citi, selling off 21.5 million shares in the second quarter, only to rebuild its stake to–you guessed it–21.5 million shares last quarter.
Renaissance, at least, is a good deal less bullish on our friends at Bank of America. The Long Island quant fund rid itself of almost all of its shares in the soon-to-be-CEO-less firm, which keeps finding ways to make The Worst Job on Wall Street even worse.
There’s a new job requirement for the next Bank of America CEO, should one ever be found: dealing with a completely dysfunctional board of directors.
The U.S.’s largest bank continues to devour itself in its search for a successor to the apparently irreplaceable Ken Lewis. And so the firm will miss its second self-imposed deadline to name a winner of the Worst Job on Wall Street contest. There will be no new BofA CEO by Thanksgiving, leaving the bank little more than a month before Lewis’ resignation takes effect.
Not content to ravage the bank with his acquisition of Merrill Lynch and acceptance of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke as his liege lords, Lewis seems to have picked the worst possible time to resign. You see, at the Federal Reserve’s request, the bank had just tossed half of its board and added six new directors, and this board has simply failed to “gel,” according to the FT. So when Lewis surprised them with his resignation in September, they didn’t know what the hell to do.
