Posted on 04/05/2009 6:23:27 AM PDT by Clive
The two men who walked through the doors of the bank branch in Cleveland were both older, neatly dressed and polite.
Claiming to be real-estate brokers, the pair inquired about opening a business account and were given a quick tour.
Suspicion was aroused only after their inquiries strayed beyond the norm to the number of tellers on duty behind the counter.
Then they blundered, betraying total ignorance of local geography, before bolting.
"We knew our cover was blown," said one of the men in a recent interview.
While the pair's identity remains a mystery to staff at the branch, the duo were in fact two of the most senior executives of Bank of Nova Scotia, Canada's third-largest bank.
They were casing the joint as they mapped out a plan to knock off all 1,400 branches of National City in a multi-billion-dollar takeover of the regional U. S. bank.
The plot was foiled when the U. S. government unwittingly erected barriers to foreign takeovers with a series of interventions to protect the country's banking system.
Although inadvertent, the U. S. Treasury scared off many buyers of banks when it agreed last fall to inject US$250-billion into more than 300 banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program(TARP).
"The TARP money really slowed down the process of consolidation," said Rob Sedran, an analyst at National Bank Financial.
But things may start to change this month when the U. S. is expected to give the healthiest banks a green light to start repaying government funds, and to seek strong partners for those on the sick list.
This is seen as one step in a series of developments that could help put acquisitions back on the agenda for Canadian banks, which stand out in the West for having escaped the worst of the financial crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalpost.com ...
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I'm not in mergers and acquisitions, but this seems like an extremely odd way to go about researching a possible purchase.
Satire
By refusing to take the money back, Obama retains control.
That bank in Nova Scotia doesn’t know it yet. But down the road and sooner rather than later it will be taken over by the same international institution that will control our banks.
If Obama won’t take the money back, the banks should just announce that they are going to divide the money amongst their employees as bonuses.
Re post 6, I don’t think that will happen.
I would think all it would take is a well publicized press conference by a bank, letting the American taxpayers know that Obama is refusing payment of our tax dollars back.
How well do you think *that* would go over?
Perhaps not satire, but a pretty funny intro in the first six or seven sentences. At first I thought they were a literal description, then satire, then realistic with gangster overtones.
Where were they from ???
Nova Scotia.
Maybe they do things differently up there.
One of the few US states or Canadian provinces I haven’t visited.
Perhaps they only lent money to people who could pay it back?
What a novel banking idea. /s
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