You could say that SunTrust dodged a bullet. The Georgia bank was itself an amalgam of smaller banks cobbled together during the deregulation of the 1980’s. On the one side were the Florida subsidiaries based in Orlando, what came to be known as the Sun Bank. On the other was the Trust Company of Georgia, both coming together in 1985 but maintaining largely separate existence until ten years later.
It was in the middle 1990’s, and the year 1995 pops out in far too many of these stories, that things took a turn. The Southeast was Ground Zero for the coming housing boom, and it was at times a mad scramble among financial firms to jockey for the best position. Consolidation was rife throughout that decade, and it would only become more intense during the first part of the next one.
In 2001, SunTrust had its sights set on Wachovia as a means to expand northward. The Carolinas were a white hot area of what had already been turned into a bubble. The Charlotte-based bank was to that point a mid-sized but respectable lender of traditional form. It made it a perfect candidate for being swallowed up by the more ambitious.
First Union Bank also of Charlotte was just such an institution. It was an early adopter of the wholesale approach, first taking advantage like SunTrust of 1980’s regulatory relaxation before getting involved in the dark side of balance sheets. By the early 2000’s, First Union was actually one of the largest derivative players in the entire world. According to figures compiled by the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), in Q2 1998 First Union reported $215 billion in gross notional derivatives. Two years later, in Q3 2000, its book had expanded fivefold to more than $1 trillion. Gramm-Leach-Bliley perfectly defined.
In a 1995 interview, CEO Ed Crutchfield, who was at the time nicknamed Fast Eddie, correctly identified the nature of the transformation then just getting started. The timing of his statement is practically cosmic given that it was 1995 when all these things truly started to explode.
I’m an unapologetic believer that banks and certain other industries are going to have to get big or be very small. The middle-sized guy is in trouble.
It was absolutely true though for reasons that more than two decades later most policymakers appear completely unaware of. He was speaking inside the conversion of banking into the “golden†age of eurodollars – get big or get run over. The way you got big was in risk, meaning funding balance sheets in ways never before thought possible, and a great many that nobody really understood too well until it was too late.
