John Stumpf: no more acquistions for now

Big 3 won’t buy failed banks

Excerpt:

In an interview with Atlanta Business Chronicle, John Stumpf, president and CEO of Wells Fargo, said the San Francisco-based financial services conglomerate would likely not be an acquirer in a regulator-assisted deal in Georgia or anywhere else.


“To the extent we participate in the consolidation of [the banking industry], our No. 1 job, No. 2 job and No. 3 job is getting Wells Fargo and Wachovia merged and do it exceedingly well,” Stumpf said Nov. 19 following meetings in Atlanta with top clients and regional management. (See Stumpf interview, Page 4A.)

Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) acquired Wachovia in October 2008 and is grappling with the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank’s challenged loan portfolio. Industry watchers said the $1.3 trillion-in-assets mega-bank has its hands full, integrating Wachovia’s 3,300 branches, extensive business lines and dealing with legacy Wachovia’s rocky loan portfolio.

“We’re not going to play in the consolidation of the market unless it is very late in [traditional] merger activity, or if we are invited in some way [by regulators],” Stumpf said. “Otherwise, we’re saying grace over all the things we can say grace over right now.”

Wells Fargo/Wachovia is the second-largest bank in metro Atlanta.

Comment: Several more years before Wachovia completely merged!

The South is Detroit's automotive rival

Comment: an interesting perspective that I had not previously considered.

An emerging Southern view of the Detroit bailout

Excerpts:

The jet-black, $37,500 Borrego sports utility vehicle showed up in the governor’s Capitol parking spot last month, a gift to the state from the South Korean car maker - which is now building a $1.2 billion plant in west Georgia.

...

In its own way, the governor’s new ride may be as meaningful as the demolition of the Ford plant in Hapeville, or the abandonment of the General Motors plant in Doraville.

For behind the philosophical back-and-forth over government intervention, scheduled to begin Monday in the U.S. Senate, is a cut-throat, economic reality: the South has ambitions of becoming Detroit’s rival.

And a federal dollar that artificially props up manufacturing on the northern end of I-75 is a dollar that hinders the creation of new economic models downstream, some Southern politicians maintain.

Last week, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina argued that the refusal of the federal government to bail out the Pittsburgh-based steel industry in the 1970s ultimately led to the establishment of new steel mills in the South. Which permitted the birth of a new facet of the auto industry - highly automated, mostly non-union, and foreign-owned.

“There wouldn’t be a BMW in South Carolina or a whole host of other auto industries scattered across the South, because we would have just kept them all in Detroit,” the Republican said.

Georgia’s Kia plant is scheduled to open next November, employing as many as 2,500 workers. The site is located within U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s 3rd District. Westmoreland, like other House Republicans, voted against the $700 Wall Street bailout.

He’ll vote against a Detroit rescue as well - on the grounds that it would create a slanted field of play for the workers he’ll soon represent.