Ken Lewis Fights Back

Take it with a grain of salt: In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis takes aim at several recent claims, including that banks aren’t lending (he says bank credit has increased during the recession) and that bank nationalization is the best solution (“The announcement of nationalization would undermine confidence in the financial system and send shudders through the investment community”). The piece is more interesting than you might expect, though it ends with the type of platitude you’d expect from a CEO: “The answer, in my view, is to let competitive forces lead us back to responsible lending practices, not the type of indiscriminate lending that has created so many problems.”