In case you missed it, The Plain Dealer ran a wonderful story in its Forum section yesterday about the demise of National City. In the past, the paper has soft-peddled the bank’s self-inflicted wounds, at one point referring to how it was “sucker punched,” as if some ominous bad guy came out of nowhere and popped executives in the face.
But yesterday, writer Becky Gaylord laid it out in plain English: The blame for National City’s nosedive falls squarely on the executive suite. This is the bank whose former CEO famously announced that it would no longer lend in Cleveland if the city passed an anti-predatory lending law. It’s a remarkably candid story for a paper that tends to see no evil when it comes to the mercantile elite, and well worth checking out.
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