That’s all, folks:
CHICAGO — Regulators shut down the bank owned by Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias’ family on Friday, setting up an expected but daunting challenge in his bid to keep President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Democratic hands.
Broadway Bank, which was heavy into real estate loans and lost $75 million last year, had been given until Monday to raise about $85 million in new capital, but the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. announced at the close of business Friday that Broadway was among four banks, all in Illinois, that had failed.
Giannoulias, who worked at the bank as a senior loan officer until running for state treasurer in 2006, gave a press conference last night, speaking like a man who had nothing to do with the collapse. Except that he did:
The Democrat’s voice cracked with emotion as he talked Friday about the collapse of Broadway Bank, which was heavy into real estate loans and lost $75 million last year. Giannoulias says nobody could have foreseen the real estate collapse.
He says he will work harder in his bid to keep the Senate seat with Democrats because he understands how Illinois families and businesses are suffering.
Giannoulias says the bank founded by his father helped many businesses that had been turned away from larger banks. He called its closing “incredibly sad” and says voters aren’t focused on the bank’s problems.
Sorry, but voters might focus on this bank’s problems. After all, this is about Senate candidate Giannoulias’s record as a banker. And as state Treasurer. The only record he has.
I also read Giannoulias’s statement to his supporters, and it reads a lot like the episode of South Park in which everyone blames “the economy” for things going bad, as though that explains it all. I don’t see anything in there about the $147 million that he and his family paid themselves out of the bank’s equity over the last nine years, nor of the bad decisions he and other senior management made that resulted in 20 percent of the bank’s loans being bad at the end of 2009.
