Word: bankes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kenneth Lewis' days as chief executive of Bank of America may finally be numbered. Observers and investors say a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission may ultimately cost Lewis the top job at the nation's largest bank...
...Monday, the bank agreed to pay $33 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that Lewis and other executives misled the bank's investors prior to its $50 billion purchase last year of brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. In a separate development on Monday, the bank also announced that it had hired Sallie Krawcheck, a former top Citigroup executive, to run the Merrill Lynch brokerage division as part of a management shake-up. Observers say the move frees up Brian Moynihan, who had been in charge of Merrill's divisions and has long been thought to be Lewis' successor...
...false alarm. Rumors had swept the trading floor that China was going to tighten money supply. That night, the central bank reaffirmed its loose monetary policy that is meant to support economic growth and pledged to refrain from imposing loan quotas to control bank lending. The next day, the Chinese banks that were said to be cutting back on credit denied they would do so. On July 31, the Shanghai index rebounded 2.7%, the biggest rise in two months; China stocks in July rose 15%, the largest monthly gain since 2007. (See pictures of China's infrastructure boom...
Investors are skittish because China's 7.1% second-quarter GDP expansion was due in part to a burst of bank lending, which was up 31% in May and 34% in June from year-ago levels. To date, cumulative loans outstanding have topped $1.1 trillion, far higher than the government's $735 billion target for the year. Most of the money is aimed at funding infrastructure projects under Beijing's two-year, $585 billion stimulus package. But according to government researchers, about $170 billion in bank loans were channeled into the stock market from January to May, which partly explains...
True, the bulk of bank lending is going to things like roads, bridges and high-speed-train lines that, in theory, should stimulate economic activity and enhance productivity for years to come. But some high-profile works such as the $10.7 billion Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai Bridge have been criticized as unnecessary vanity projects, while others are said to be wastefully duplicative - some 300 km of the Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity Railway and the Shanghai-Beijing Express Railway, for example, are overlapping routes. Some local governments have also been discovered to be faking documentation and even entire projects. (See pictures...