Henry Blodget wants Ken Lewis' head on a platter..Preferably WARM
Wow. Henry blodget is on a roll. His ire has been raised and there's no outlet except his keyboard apparently. In his latest piece, he calls on Ken Lewis to resign or face being fired by his shareholders. It's a doozy and merits a second front-page DailyBail appearance for Henry in less than 24 hours. Some very good stuff follows.
The link is here and the best snips are below:
Unlike Vikram Pandit at Shitigroup and John Thain at Merrill, Lewis can't blame the need for this bailout on his predecessor's idiotic bets. Bank of America needs another bailout solely because of an idiotic Ken Lewis bet: His decision three months ago to buy Merrill Lynch.
No one put a gun to Ken's head and said "You've got to buy Merrill." There wasn't some secret backroom Treasury deal where Hank Paulson forced him to take one for the team.
On the contrary, Ken Lewis bought Merrill because he had always wanted to own it and because he thought he was getting a good deal. Furthermore, he knew exactly what he was getting: A firm that, for four straight quarters had been forced to write down tens of billions of losses on idiotic bets and still had about $1 trillion of those bets on its balance sheet.
In fact, there is no scenario we can think of short of deliberate fraud by Merrill Lynch in which Ken Lewis should not be fired. His disastrous acquisition decisions--first on Countrywide and now on Merrill Lynch--have brought Bank of America to the brink of collapse. He has destroyed the firm's shareholders, and, once again, forced U.S. taxpayers to bail him and his demolished firm out.
If Ken Lewis doesn't do the right thing--accept responsibility for this disaster and resign on tomorrow's earnings call--he should be fired. Bank of America shareholders and US taxpayers deserve no less.
We love reading this type of bailout rant here at DailyBail. Bravo.
Jan 16, 2009 at 2:43 AM
Reader Comments (7)
Henry is the man. ClusterStock is the reason I am here right now.
Almost First Bitches!
SPODE
Henry has made his second coming into a hell of an operation over at clusterstock/alleyinsider.
we used to trade against his internet bubble picks from '98 to 2001 so i know his first career well...
my biggest battles with him were over priceline during it's first 90 days post IPO and they are still documented on siliconinvestor.com...
i was and still am 'coachbobknight' on that classic site...
More than three months and more than $350bn since the passage of the TARP and the Libor OIS is still in excess of one standard deviation from its historical mean. Now we've got Son of TARP and while pot holes are murder on my Carrera I'm pretty sure that, shovel-ready or not, a bunch of guys standing around in orange vests aren't going to solve the structural problems facing this debtor nation.
I think that Steve Roach has it right in his January 15th piece, "America's Japan Syndrome", when he writes, "At more than 70% of US GDP, the bubble-infected American consumer actually poses a much greater risk to today's US economy than that imparted by Japan's bubble-induced capital-spending boom, which accounted for only about 17% of Japanese GDP at its peak in the late 1980s." Further, he writes, "A cure will take time and a new pro-saving mentality that encourages American families to live within their means."
@bridge
i hadn't seen the piece...i'll look for it...the american consumer is tapped...
it's all a joke...al the new keynesians make me want to puke...
government spending isn't going to help...bailouts aren't going to help...both will jsut quicken us on the road to federal bankruptcy...
the solution is let these banks and institutions fail...let us suffer for awhile and then begin to rebuild...
i'll have more on this soon...
I also want Ken Lewis' head on a platter. What a moron he is. I hope he gets fired soon. Since we taaxpayers own so much of his company, perhaps we can fire him. That would be nice.
I just found your site through TechCrunch. Someone mentioned it in the comments section of an iphone story. I like it. I like that you have no advertising. lol
I am a single mother with 2 young sons and I work in the tech industry in california. Our state is facing a large budget shortfall this year and we have been asking Washington to bail us out and I think it's wrong. The politicians in our state would rather look to Washington to cover our budget shortfall than actually look at the reasons for our shortfall. Yes, revenues are down this year becaue of the slowdown, but the true issue is bloated stae budgets, and health care and pension benefits that have been promised to public workers.
In vallejo which filed for bakruptcy in 2008, there were 42 police and firefighters earning in excess of $200k per year. Are you kidding me? For public employees, this is unreal. And these employees will receive 90% of their salary in the form of a pension for every year for the rest of their lives. And we, the taxpayers of california have to pay for their excesssice packages.
And if Washington just bails out all these states that are in trouble, then these states will never be forced to cutback their spending. And these bloated state salaries and pensions well never be corrected.
It makes me very upset when I think about.
update: i am posting my thoughts about the state bailouts in all the comment's section.
Finally, someone with the guts to speak the truth and call it like it truly is for a change.
However, there are two parts to the story when it comes to this whole financial meltdown mess brought on by corporate greed and massive stupidity.
Bank of America for years pushed the variable rate mortgage loan program that encouraged people who could not afford a specific home based on their true (current) income to buy a house above their means hoping there financial situation would improve down the road and they would eventually “Grow” into their mortgage.
I personally refused the variable mortgage plan in spite of BOA personnel calling (pushing) me 9 times before my loan closing to switch from fixed rate to a variable rate mortgage. My income at the time of my loan closing was over $90,000.00 a year with NO DEBTS. BOA personnel kept calling and telling me that I could afford a lot more house than what I was buying in an effort to get me to but more house (increase size - add on etc).
I know four homeowners who took the BOA bait for variable rates with the very low starting monthly mortgage payments and they all lost their homes right when the Mortgage meltdown started. BOA personnel have the nerve to turn around now and state that they need to foreclose on all of those irresponsible homebuyers they encouraged.
Ken Lewis has destroyed the reputation of Bank of America, screwed over the investors who trusted him, laid-off BOA employees while he was getting his 24 million dollar plus salary and bonuses compensation package, and the Bank as well as Ken Lewis are now hated by millions of Americans which you can see all over the internet.
If you want to see what Ken Lewis and BOA are also doing to RESPONSIBLE homeowners who refused their variable rate plans, just go to http://www.justiceandlight.com/ scroll down on the main page to the PBS case # 9845 link to read about what this homeowner feels about Ken Lewis and what they have been put through buy Ken Lewis.
Seeing Ken Lewis smiling if front of the White House the other day on T.V. made me ill. Ken looks like what I would envision the devil to look like as he welcomes you to hell with that grin on his face.
Keep up the excellent work Henry. You make me proud again to be an American sir.
I’m going to email Justice and Light about your excellent website.