Were most crisis era bank acquisitions failures?

JPMorgan Chairman Jamie Dimon states in a Bloomberg interview that he now regards JPMorgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns and of Washington Mutual during the global financial crisis as “mistakes”. I used to think that these were among the better deals in the whole lot of crisis era acquisitions which include such monumental disasters as Bank of America’s acquisition of Countrywide or Lloyds’ acquisition of HBOS. But Dimon says that the Bear Stearns purchase ended up costing JPMorgan $20 billion while if I remember right the headline acquisition cost was only a little over $1 billion (and that after Dimon raised the price per share from $2 to $10). If even JPMorgan’s relatively good deals ended up being big mistakes, then I wonder whether the only sound crisis era banking acquisition might be Wells Fargo’s acquisition of Wachovia. Of course, the very best deals were Warren Buffet’s minority stakes in Goldman Sachs and GE, but these do not count as acquisitions. On a purely accounting basis, the US government did make money on many of its rescue deals, but this accounting does not include the hidden costs that contribute heavily to the $20 billion price tag that Dimon now puts on the Bear deal. What all this means is that even at the depths of the global financial crisis, it would have made a lot of sense to heed the good old advice not to try to catch a falling knife.

Posted at 1:30 pm IST on Wed, 2 Mar 2016         permanent link

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