Word: abboud
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...Abboud well remembers stories about the day more than 40 years ago when his father, the son of a Lebanese farmer, was denied a loan by a Boston banker. As a result, the family's heating and ventilating business went bankrupt, and Alfred Abboud was forced into teaching to pay off $5,000 owed to creditors. The incident, says A. Robert Abboud, taught him that one of the worst things a banker could do was to turn down a borrower of good character...
...Abboud now has the opportunity to apply such wisdom on a grand scale. Last week, after a superachieving career in U.S. banking, Abboud, 46, took over as chairman and chief executive of First Chicago Corp., parent of the First National Bank of Chicago, the nation's ninth largest bank (assets: $18.2 billion). If confronted today by a borrower in the same situation as his father, Abboud would make the loan that the Boston banker turned down. Abboud feels that banks have forgotten character and loaned money to "too many high rollers...
Among bankers, First Chicago had a reputation for overextending itself on loan commitments. But the bank's profitable international business helped offset earnings losses from bad loans. What is more, Abboud adds, those losses were also restrained by First Chicago's policy, begun more than a year ago, of limiting loan commitments and looking for "highest quality at the greatest return." For First Chicago and banks generally, such conservative lending policies will prevail for some time as a hangover from the recession. But Abboud feels the loan-loss picture is at its darkest now, and should brighten...
...Robert Abboud, 45. Deputy chairman of the First Chicago Corp., holding company for the powerful First National Bank of Chicago, Abboud is certain to have considerable influence on U.S. and world economic matters in the years ahead. The Boston-born grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Abboud collected business and law degrees from Harvard. As head of First National's international banking section, he helped turn a provincial institution into a worldwide banking power, is now the favorite to become the bank's next chairman. A monetary and economic conservative, Abboud considers himself "a liberal in social matters," advocates that...
...General Abboud was overthrown in a coup last year, and recent elections held in the Moslem north (TIME, May 28) were convincingly won by the conservative coalition led by 29-year-old, Oxford-educated Economist Sadik el Mahdi, the great-grandson of the famed Mahdi who massacred the British at Khartoum in 1885. As El Mahdi's nominee, Mahgoub was acceptable to all sides. A gifted Arabic poet, the new Prime Minister also has degrees in law and engineering, became Foreign Minister when his country won independence in 1956, and led the Sudan's first delegation...