IRISH AMERICA IRISH AMERICA

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Parades in Southie. His own family immigrated in the 1850s to upstate New York and grew vegetables. Our meeting took place on the afternoon of June 15, at the newly constructed Bank of America Tower at Avenue on the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. The massive steel and glass structure – a one billion dollar project – located on Avenue of the Americas – would seem to signal Bank of America’s confidence that it will this. But it is a tribute to those hardscrabble ancestors, and perhaps because he had inherited some of their tenacity and understanding “that it doesn’t all break your way all the time, so you’ve got to just power through it,” that Moynihan took time out from his hectic schedule to talk to Irish America, and agreed to give the Keynote Address at our annual Wall Street 50 dinner on August 24. Your family came over when? In the 1850’s. Both my parents come from small towns in upstate New York where the Irish part of their families had farms and then opened some stores. My grandfather was a lawyer up there. My dad went to school and became a chemist to work for DuPont. I’m one of eight children, number six. My parents moved to a little town in Ohio, called Marietta, the month before I was born. to go to law school. It was a very supportive place and we had more fun than we probably should have had. It’s a great school for a lot of reasons, but the law school was small, you really knew the professors, you really knew the undergraduates. I played rugby so it was fun, too. Do you think Rev. John Perkins, Notre Dame’s president, was right to invite President Obama to give the commencement speech? I think he was right, his reasoning was right. I think at the end of the day one of the challenges for a place like Notre Dame is to ensure that they maintain their willingness to have the debate. I think going back to Father Hesburgh [“Father Ted,” the man who led the University of Notre Dame for 35 years], the reason why the university has had such an weather this current financial crisis. As I receive my visitor’s pass from Security and find my way into the inner sanctum of the largest bank in the United States, passing through a futuristic set of glass doors, I cannot help but think of Moynihan’s ancestors being processed by immigration officials after landing in New York. They could hardly have foreseen a future that included anything like TOP LEFT: Brian and his father Robert, near the Lakes of Killarney. ABOVE: Brian with his wife Susan, daughter Mary, and son Christopher. LEFT: Brian and Mary on the family’s trip to Ireland in 2008. After doing your undergrad at Brown you went to Notre Dame Law School.Was that a different experience? Very different. Brown was a great school but it was very heavily Eastern. My grandfather and my uncle both went to Notre Dame, so I had a great Notre Dame tradition. It was the best place in the world impact on political leaders and others in this country, is that they’re willing to have debates even though they have a heritage and a particular point of view. It served them well. When were you last in Ireland? We went last August [2008]. We took my father and mother, and three of my siblings and our children went, so we had about 18 people traveling around in a bus, and it was a lot of fun. We went to Dublin for a few days and then took off down to the southwest. We had a bus 40 IRISH AMERICA AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009
driver who had that great Irish humor; we just laughed. Did you discuss the economy? He [the bus driver] and other Irish people we met along the way had the common view that it was United States property values and subprime mortgages and all that that created this worldwide financial crisis which was starting to affect Ireland. But at the end of the day, it is local conditions that drive housing prices. Irish housing prices had gotten so out of control relative to what a person could pay that you knew they were going to face what they faced. It’s a classic problem that if you try to outgrow your normal growth rate there’s always a bubble on the other side of it. And as soon as the economy slowed down a little it just all came crashing down. It’ll adjust and come back. Will the U.S. economy also adjust? Our view, as a company, is that we’ll start to see a little growth in the latter part of this year and into next year, but the American consumer is still struggling to pay their debts. American companies are more – they’re stabilizing, I think would be the word we’d say right now, in terms of their employment, in terms of their view of their future. They’re not robust and growing but they’re stabilizing, so they’ve come through the worst of it, and we see we’re starting to come out the other side. And I think that bodes well for the whole world because when the American consumer spends, that helps everyone. The Irish government was the first to guarantee bank deposits. And after its bailout it now has 75 percent voting rights now in Anglo-Irish Bank. How does that compare to here? I thought the Irish government did a good job of stabilizing the situation. What’s hard to appreciate here is how much more consolidated most [national] economies are compared to the U.S. – like Ireland in banking. When you have three or four key institutions that aren’t stable and people start pulling their money out, Brian Moynihan at the Bank of America Tower in Midtown Manhattan. it’s really tough. So I think the government did the right thing to calm the population down by guaranteeing their deposits, guaranteeing the liability side, and injecting their capital. I assume their goal would be to sell their stock positions down over time as the economy stabilizes. But in the U.S. because of the number of institutions and the size of the capital markets, we were able to raise our capital, our company and other companies, through private investors, after the government gave us capital. Are there lessons to learn from the crisis? Ireland and America and UK and Europe and China and Japan, everybody’s going to learn a series of lessons from all this, but I think the common lesson is going to be about leverage, and too much borrowing. In Ireland for example, I saw houses that were valued at over $2 million, beautiful houses but miles from the city in the countryside, where population pressures were nonexistent. People bought outside their means, they could’ve taken cash out to do something else with it, just the same as the United States. A financial crisis was created by Continued on page 100 PHOTO: KIT DE FEVER AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009 IRISH AMERICA 41
Page 1: IRISH AMERICA August/September 2009
Page 7: WALL STREET50 KEYNOTE SPEAKER THE L
Page 16: WALL STREET50 PAINTING: KAMIL KUBIK
Page 22: Marianne Brown Omgeo L.L.C. Mariann
Page 29: Michael Doorley • Fidelity Invest
Page 36: Denis Kelleher Wall Street Access D
Page 41: WALL STREET50 Kevin Murray AXA Fina

IRISH AMERICA IRISH AMERICA

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