On the face of it, Wall Street seems to like Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
Last week, the nation’s second-biggest bank said its earnings fell less than expected, and the media portrayed it as a victory. The stock went up.
Ask analysts and investors, and there’s a vague consensus: Hey, the CEO has been there for 15 years. Let the board grant his wish: Let him run the place for five more — until he’s 70.
Inside, however, the troops are getting restless, and for plenty of reasons. Culturally, Moynihan is an odd fit for an outfit that’s based on wheeling and dealing.
He’s a lawyer by training — having joined BofA as general counsel from one of its many acquisitions, Boston-based Fleet Financial.
Indeed, the CEO brings a lawyer’s hesitancy to the job, according to sources inside the bank.
Frustrated staffers point to a plodding management style and aversion to take the right kind of risk, particularly on the trading desk to support big corporate clients and their banking deals.
This, they say, is a key reason that BofA — despite its massive balance sheet — remains an also-ran in investment banking, perennially lagging behind the likes of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
It’s also why shares of BofA lag far behind JPMorgan’s and Goldman’s over the past five years in what has been a bull market for finance stocks.
“Brian likes to brag that our desk hasn’t had a loss in years,” said one BofA insider. “That’s true, but if you don’t lose a little supporting clients, you won’t get those big-money banking clients. That’s how we keep losing to Goldman and JPM.”
A BofA spokesman had no comment.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, trading risk — using the bank’s capital to make market bets — has gotten a bad name and not for totally bad reasons.
Trading miscues are one reason the entire financial system tanked, and regulators have since made it difficult to run large, so-called proprietary trades.
Of course the roots of the financial crisis are more complicated. The housing bubble that sparked the panic began with government policy that encouraged banks to make home loans to everyone, even people without a job.
Banks then packaged those loans into bonds and got sloppy and kept lots of them on their books. The bonds tanked and cratered balance sheets systemwide.
BofA was among those that were hit, of course. It’s how Moynihan got his job. Ken Lewis was ousted, and the board tapped in-house lawyers led by Moynihan to clean things up.
He’s done a decent job in that regard, convincing Warren Buffett to make a strategic investment. The stock is well off its post-crisis lows.
That said, the right kind of trading risk — using his $3 trillion balance sheet to support customers — got squeezed out of the business model and that’s now costing the firm, internal detractors tell me.
Regulators are less concerned with those trades. The 2008 crisis is over, and banks are much better capitalized.
Accordingly, this is a time to take a little risk and use your balance sheet to support clients — like supporting trades for a big investment banking client that just floated a bond deal.
Fail to show up for such deals and you will lose lots of high-end clients — as BofA has been doing, insiders tell me.
Moynihan’s supporters will point to 10 straight quarters of revenue growth in sales and trading.
What they can’t deny is that his risk aversion isn’t saving the bank from any looming Armageddon, while putting money in the pockets of bankers at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
Maybe that’s why Buffett has been unloading his stake lately, according to the chatter inside, anyway. If it starts to make its way onto the Street, it could force the boss into an earlier retirement than he’d like.
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