What a banana republic it has become... Regulation FD, equal treatment of shareholders? Pfft, it is more lying at the unwritten order and behest of the treasury. A rallye based on this .. built on sand... quicksand. And the SEC... looks bad as well:
> John Coffee, a securities law professor at Columbia University Law School in New York, said Lewis’s testimony to Cuomo’s office puts the SEC in a “very difficult” position.
“They are under some pressure to bring action against Lewis if they feel that Lewis was withholding material information,” Coffee said. Companies can’t argue that it’s in “the national interest” to “withhold material facts from your shareholders.”
‘Put Something in Writing’
Lewis testified that he asked Bernanke to “put something in writing” regarding the U.S. government’s plan to support Bank of America’s acquisition in view of Merrill’s mounting losses.
After Bernanke said he would consider the idea, Paulson called Lewis and said, according to Lewis, “First it would be so watered down, it wouldn’t be as strong as what we were going to say to you verbally, and secondly, this would be a disclosable event and we do not want a disclosable event.”
Attached to Cuomo’s letter was a Dec. 22 e-mail from Lewis to his board. “I just talked with Hank Paulson,” the e-mail reads. “He said that there was no way the Federal Reserve and the Treasury could send us a letter of any substance without public disclosure which, of course, we do not want.” |
