Charlotte’s banking bust

The bust hits the boomtown that banks built

Excerpt:

A monument to the financial crisis is rising amid this city's thicket of skyscrapers: a gleaming, glass-walled trophy tower that was intended as a fitting headquarters for Wachovia's national banking empire.

It will open instead as the headquarters of a regional power company. Wachovia, unable to survive a run of bad decisions, was swallowed by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo during the depths of the crisis last year.

Few American cities prospered more over the past two decades than Charlotte, its growth propelled and gilded by Wachovia and its crosstown rival, Bank of America. Executives shoehorned gaudy mansions into old neighborhoods around downtown. Workers poured into vast subdivisions on the city's ever-expanding periphery. With coffers overflowing, giddy public officials spent tax dollars on a manmade river for whitewater rafting.

Comment: Of interest to me on several counts: 1.) the WF / Wachovia merger; 2.) Charlotte is a possible retirement location