This Is the Formal End to the Credit Crisis
The economists will tell you that the great credit crisis which laid low the global economy ended in 2012, five full years after it started.
I say it officially ended last Friday.
That is because on Friday Bank of America abandoned a glaring emblem of the credit crisis: the trademark for Countrywide Home Loans’s last tagline before the crisis began.
On June 19, 2007, Countrywide published its trademark for its new tagline, “Countrywide Can.” At that time, there were few signs of the five years of financial hell to come, although the wheels of the mortgage industry were already starting to wobble by then (New Century Financial Corp., another subprime lender, stopped originating loans the previous month). The new tagline was part of a longer slogan: “No one can do what Countrywide can.” How true that was!
And then the crisis set in. On August 17, 2007, Countrywide expressed concerns about its liquidity and started reining in its vacuous underwriting. By January 2008, Bank of America announced that it would subsume Countrywide in a $4 billion transaction. Countrywide had been valued at about $24 billion the year before. More than 7,500 Countrywide employees lost their jobs as a result of Bank of America’s acquisition.
But this ungodly chapter in US financial services history came to a close on Friday. Lawyers at a Winston-Salem, N.C., law firm presided over the abandonment of Countrywide’s word mark. And with it, the credit crisis closes.
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