There is a herd of elephants trampling after the "pending bank consolidation" story today, including the cover story of The Wall Street Journal.
Two stories stood out, in The Washington Post and Fortune for the way they each wrote strong but very different stories pegged to the same information, fresh FDIC data on how many U.S. banks are troubled.
In the WaPo, David Cho focuses on FDIC Chief Sheila Bair's attempt to keep saving the big banks during the recent crisis from creating a de facto oligarchy in the U.S. market and how so far, she is failing. Much as the government decided to react to the auto and housing bubbles by coming up with strategies to reinflate them, Cho's article spells out ways the government is trying to protect us from the risk of "too big to fail" banks by making them bigger. While Bair's quotes lead the story, there is strong content from both community banking associations and bank executives later in the story.
Extra special PR Tip of the Day: this is the first article in an ongoing series, so get on Cho's call list today!
Colin Barr over at Fortune, writes from a more investment-oriented perspective, looking at the result of overall weakness of the banking market and handicapping the potential impact of consolidation. Consultants and economists live to speculate, so they were heavily involved in Barr's article as were banks who wanted to make sure they are positioned as acquirers rather than sellers. Bair makes a cameo appearance at the very end - Barr's signal without saying that M&A is going to be the controlling narrative of the story, not regulation.
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