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.
時間過的真快。早在去年12月4日，儘管當時人們認爲無人應得到2008年「年度最佳銀行家」的榮譽，但《美國銀行家》(American Banker)仍延續了其傳統，評選美國銀行(Bank of America)董事長兼執行長肯•李維士(Ken Lewis)爲「年度最佳銀行家」。這是李維士6年來第二次獲此殊榮。該雜誌頒獎給李維士的原因是，他是「經濟動盪時期一支關鍵的穩定力量」。該雜誌還提到他在去年的兩次營救行動：一次是以約40億美元拯救了抵押貸款機構Countrywide Financial；幾個月後則是對令人尊敬的美林(Merrill Lynch)的營救，收購成本最初是以價值約500億美元的美銀股票換取美林的股票。儘管這兩項交易讓李維士受到「攻擊」，但《美國銀行家》稱，他「從未放棄自己的信念，即每個收購目標都有價值——不僅僅指機會價值，也包括戰略價值。」