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.