Otterblog

Many years ago, when I had just become the Journal’s business editor, I paid a call on John Medlin, then the chairman and chief executive of Wachovia. He’s a smart and cordial and curious man, and he had a question for me as we looked down on Winston-Salem from a dining room in the old Wachovia tower. “What do people think of the bank,” he asked. What I told him was there was a perception that Wachovia wasn’t the most generous corporate citizen. In Charlotte, where there were two large regional banks, the competition to be first was a battle of hearts and minds, house by house, block by block…
Those sorts of competitions to be biggest, best, most loved, etc. take their toll over time, and we’ve seen the fallout first hand in the past few weeks. Bank of America, the successor of NCNB/‘NationsBank etc., is now one of the survivors, an institution throwing out life preservers (for a price), and First Union/Wachovia, which doubled down to grow, is in the lifeboat, but at a steep price for most everyone involved.
It isn’t pretty to watch or write about.
The question that everybody has been asking me this week is “How bad is Winston going to get hit?” My guess is a lot, but that’s just informed speculation.
We still tend to think of Wachovia as a local institution, but in reality it isn’t, and hasn’t been for 7 years.
What I think is interesting is that all this comes almost exactly 20 years after the battle for RJR began. That was the deal that defined Winston-Salem and helped spur the changes that remade the city. So the question beyond how bad is Winston going to get hit is really the more important one. Which is this: What do we do next?
When the dust clears, that is the next great story in our city.