5 Dumbest Things on Wall Street: May 1

Ken Lewis Gets Stripped

Don't tease us, you naughty shareholders of Bank of America(BAC). If you are going to make Ken Lewis take it off, make him take it all off.

BofA's shareholders voted to strip the chairman's title from Ken Lewis by a narrow margin Wednesday, as investors at the company's annual meeting expressed disappointment with his handling of the Merrill Lynch deal and the bank's slumping shares. Director Walter Massey was chosen to replace Lewis as chairman of the bank's board, though Lewis will maintain his positions as president and CEO.

All 18 directors were voted in by what BofA characterized as "comfortable margins." As to whether their easy election victories will make the banks irate shareholders sleep any more comfortably at night, we here at the Five Dumbest Lab highly doubt it.

But that's a story for another dumb day.

Ken Lewis, not his flunkies on the board, danced on the mainstage at Wednesday's meeting. And he was anything but revealing, especially when it came to the question of whether BofA will have to raise additional capital at the conclusion of recent government stress tests of the nation's 19 largest banks.

"We're still waiting to hear from our regulators about what will be required, so we don't have enough information at this point to make a decision," Lewis said at the top of the meeting. Lewis also said he could not discuss details of the stress tests, which are not yet complete, until he gets the green light from regulators.

Clever move, Ken. You're getting very good at kicking the problem upstairs, blaming Washington for running your bank into the ground.

Back in December it was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressuring you to remain quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch, which the bank was buying. In your testimony before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in February, you said "it wasn't up to me" to disclose Merrill's fourth-quarter losses as they were becoming apparent.

Now, you are once again waiting on government instruction to tell you what to do.

So please remind us again Ken: Now that the shareholders have snatched your chairman title, and the government has clipped your authority -- what do we need you for anyway?

Dumb-o-meter score: 75 -- King Ken has no clothes. And it's getting awful windy in Charlotte.

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