Bank of America

Bank of America

Introduction

The Bank of America is one of the largest banks in the world. It became the largest bank since July 2006. The Bank of America is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank originated in 1784, with the help of the Bank of Massachusetts, and this makes the Bank of America the second oldest bank in the United States of America. The Bank of America is the listed company, and it is listed on the NYSE and the Tokyo Stock Exchange list. In 2008, the Bank of America has 33.1 billion U.S. dollars, which makes it the most valuable brand in banking in the United States of America, and it is ranked 14th in the world's banking. The Bank of America has 288,000 employees at the end of year 2010. The sales in the same year, i.e. 2010 were estimated 134 billion U. S. dollars. The balance sheet of the bank showed the total of 2.26 trillion U.S. dollars. The bank is one of the 29 major banks, by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) as "systemically important financial institution" (systemically significant financial institution) were classified. It is therefore subject to special monitoring and more stringent demands on the equipment with equity (Moscow, 2006).

The creation of the Bank of America was by the mergers and acquisitions of many banks. The banks such as the Bank of Italy, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many more merged together and acquisition helped in creating the Bank of America. Talking about today's Bank of America, it came by the acquisition of Bank of America by NationsBank in 1998. The headquartered is in North Carolina. The emergence of NationsBank dates back to 1874 when the National Commercial Bank was founded in 1957 merged with the American Trust Co. to American Commercial Bank. In 1960 the name North Carolina National Bank in 1991 and changed after a series of further acquisitions, in NationsBank.

Due to the 2007/2009 financial crisis, Bank of America $ 2.5 billion for the troubled company bought Countrywide Financial. On 15 September 2008, it was announced that Merrill Lynch, which at the time third largest investment bank is taken over the United States. The acquisition was paid for with shares worth 50 billion U.S. dollars. The purchase of Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest U.S. investment bank, was canceled by the Bank of America. Bank of America has now received $ 25 billion from the federal bank bailout plan (James, 2010). On 17 November 2008 they announced a long-term strategic investment to pursue the remainder of an option to purchase shares of state funds China Safe Investments and now hold 44.7 billion shares of China Construction Bank, worth about $ 24 billion.

On 29 August 2011, the Bank of America with that in order to increase the equity half of the 10 percent stake worth 8.3 billion U.S. dollars of the China Construction Bank will sell to unnamed investors. A share of around five percent will continue to keep the ...