Five weeks later, Mr Lewis's strategy is in tatters. Not only have top Merrill executives been leaving Mother Merrill in droves, including Greg Fleming, president and chief operating officer, and Bob McCann, head of its brokerage business, and the promised 35,000 firings from the combined bank are still to be done. Now Mr Lewis has also backed up his behemoth to the US Treasury and loaded it with an additional $20bn of equity – on top of $25bn that Bank of America and Merrill had already received – and won insurance on a $118bn portfolio of toxic securities. Mr Lewis has pulled a Vikram Pandit, duplicating in short order the similar quasi-nationalisation the government put together for Citigroup in November when it invested $45bn in the crestfallen bank and insured $306bn of toxic waste. With Citigroup in the process of being slowly dismantled ever since, nobody has given much thought to naming Mr Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive, the banker of the year.
时间过的真快。早在去年12月4日，尽管当时人们认为无人应得到2008年“年度最佳银行家”的荣誉，但《美国银行家》(American Banker)仍延续了其传统，评选美国银行(Bank of America)董事长兼首席执行官肯•刘易斯(Ken Lewis)为“年度最佳银行家”。这是刘易斯6年来第二次获此殊荣。该杂志颁奖给刘易斯的原因是，他是“manbetx20客户端下载 动荡时期一支关键的稳定力量”。该杂志还提到他在去年的两次营救行动：一次是以约40亿美元拯救了抵押贷款机构Countrywide Financial；几个月后则是对令人尊敬的美林(Merrill Lynch)的营救，收购成本最初是以价值约500亿美元的美银股票换取美林的股票。尽管这两项交易让刘易斯受到“攻击”，但《美国银行家》称，他“从未放弃自己的信念，即每个收购目标都有价值——不仅仅指机会价值，也包括战略价值。”