Word: bankes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Atlanta, golden city of the "New New" South, has been showing big veins of pyrite lately. First came the fall from grace of Famous Local Banker Bert Lance. In February a group of banks headed by Manhattan's Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. announced one of the biggest foreclosures in U.S. history; it prepared to take over the Omni, a glittering Atlanta complex of offices, swank shops, hotel and ice rink, because the Omni's owners were failing to pay off $90 million in debts. And last week Richard Kattel, boy-wonder chairman of Georgia's largest bank...
What happened was that Atlanta simply became overbuilt. New buildings failed to fill up, and high-cost real estate loans went unpaid. Late in 1976 the huge Colony Square commercial-residential redevelopment went bankrupt; last August Lance's National Bank of Georgia skipped a dividend. That same month, C & S cut its own quarterly dividend from 13? a share to 6?. In January it omitted the dividend for the first time since 1906, an alarming step for a bank of its stature. Then the Comptroller of the Currency ruled that even the slim profits C & S had reported...
...grants the point, conceding that he forgot all the lessons his banker father drummed into his head about the collapse of the Florida real estate boom of the 1920s. But Kattel had made himself vulnerable through overoptimism; he long refused to write down the value of loans in the bank's faltering portfolio. As C & S head, he had developed the boyish habit of sending symbolic bullets to Atlantans who made tough decisions. He dispatched one to Lance, whom he had helped to raise money for Jimmy Carter's Inauguration, when Lance was grilled by a Senate committee...
Atlanta and the bank doubtless will survive. The Comptroller judged C & S to be "well-capitalized and sound." Meanwhile, Kattel, like Lance, has been deluged by job offers. As Poet Stephen Vincent Benet wrote about one of Georgia's founding families in John Brown's Body, there is a "melancholy pride/ In never choosing the winning side...
...pipe gas into New England. George H. ("Bud") Lawrence, president of the American Gas Association, predicts that by 1985 the U.S. will be importing altogether 1.6 trillion cu. ft. of gas a year in liquid form, or one-tenth of all the gas it will burn then. Chase Manhattan Bank experts put 1985 imports at 2.2 trillion...