Startups in a Downturn

Entrepreneurs who helped build their startups into tech stalwarts—companies like Cisco, Oracle, and Google—share lessons on how to thrive during tough times

By Spencer E. Ante

December 1987 was no time to be raising money for a startup. Computer engineer Len Bosack was trying to attract funding for a young enterprise called Cisco Systems (CSCO). But the stock market had just crashed and the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted 40% since October. Gun-shy venture capitalists either didn't get the newfangled technology or deemed it too risky.

Making matters worse, Bosack was running low on the savings he had used to bootstrap the business, and competition was gaining steam. It wasn't until this 75th meeting that he found a receptive audience. The willing financier was Donald Valentine of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. On Dec. 14, two months after Black Monday, Sequoia invested $2.5 million in Cisco. "Valentine's reasoning was pretty simple," Bosack recalls. "It doesn't matter what they are. They are selling stuff in a bad market. With a little bit of capital and more experienced help they should be able to do better."
Better is just what Cisco did. By the time of its initial share sale three years later, in February 1990—during a recession—the maker of telecom networking equipment was worth $224 million. Within a decade, Cisco Systems had become one of the world's most valuable companies.

Greatness Can Emerge from a Slump

Today, some of America's sharpest financiers and entrepreneurs say Cisco's story holds a profound lesson easily forgotten amid financial turmoil: Great companies can be built during tough times. "For us, Cisco is always the company we think of when we think about bad times," says Michael Moritz, a general partner with Sequoia Capital who was a young associate when the firm made its investment.

Cisco is just one example. In the history of technology, many other great companies either were founded during downturns or forged business models during bad times. In 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, two engineers started Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in a garage in northern California. During the recession of 1957, Digital Equipment, the first computer company to challenge IBM (IBM), set up shop in a Civil War-era wool mill, sparking a high-tech boom in Massachusetts. "It makes sense to do research and development counter-cyclically," says Tom Nicholas, associate professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Group of Harvard Business School. "Recessions can be really useful strategic opportunities."

Entrepreneurs, financiers, and historians point to several reasons for this phenomenon. For starters, everything is cheaper during a downturn, including the cost of labor, materials, and office space. There's less competition, both from incumbents that are trying to put out their own fires and from startups that find it harder to raise money. And the tough times force entrepreneurs to work on their business models earlier, so they end up reaching profitability more quickly than when money comes cheap. "The companies are tougher because they were tested during a tougher time," says Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship.

In fact, Silicon Valley itself was largely created during the nasty recession of the mid-1970s. During that decade, entrepreneurs and financiers built companies that pioneered three entirely new industries: video games through Atari, personal computers with Apple (AAPL), and biotechnology thanks to Genentech (DNA).

Find Your Passion

Talk to the entrepreneurs who built great companies during bad times, and they'll tell you there are a number of lessons that help explain their success. Atop the list: Founders of the most successful companies are motivated less by the lure of riches than the dream to solve an important problem and benefit the world. As a young, self-taught computer engineer, Mitch Kapor saw an opportunity in the early 1980s, another recessionary period, to create software tools for personal computers that would help businesses be more productive. So in 1982 he founded his own software company called Lotus.

The startup was an immediate hit because it was the first software program to demonstrate the value of a personal computer to the business world. During an October 1982 conference, Kapor showed off his initial product, Lotus 1-2-3, the first software tool to integrate spreadsheets and graphing programs. After taking $900,000 in orders during the conference, he had to tear up all of his sales forecasts. "It was one of the biggest shocks of my life," he recalls. "It turned out there was an enormous latent demand for what we did."
Kapor also noticed that market leaders such as Microsoft (MSFT) had taken their eyes off the ball. In 1981, IBM had introduced its first PC with a 16-bit microprocessor. Microsoft, contracted to provide the operating system for IBM, was also building a spreadsheet, but it was based on code built for machines with slower, 8-bit processors. Kapor realized Microsoft had left him an opening. He set about creating spreadsheet software tailored to the new chips. In 1983, its first full year of business, Lotus sold an astonishing $53 million in software. "If a product meets an unmet need, it doesn't matter if the economy is bad," Kapor says.
Cater to Your Market

Another key lesson is to pick markets strategically, says Umang Gupta, who joined database maker Oracle (ORCL) in 1980 as employee No. 17 and wrote its first business plan. Ultimately, the company wanted to build a database program that would work with multiple types of computers, from minicomputers to PCs to mainframes, those hulking machines that crunched massive amounts of data. But Oracle couldn't do it all at once. It started out creating a database that worked on minicomputers such as Digital Equipment's PDP-11. Then Oracle methodically went upstream, pursuing mainframes next, rather than going for mainframes and PCs at the same time. "We concentrated our bets," Gupta says. "We built a culture of an extremely focused, aggressive company."

For some companies, it may be tempting to slough off belt-tightening customers loath to place new orders amid a slump. Bad move, financiers say. The best companies go the extra mile during a cold spell, engendering goodwill that pays off when the economy bounces back and companies have more money to spend.
At Cisco, Bosack launched a customer advocacy group, one of whose jobs was to help customers design their computer networks before they spent even one penny with the company. Employees would spend weeks holed up in the basements of customer offices fixing the glitches that popped up. "We were happy to help," Bosack says. "We didn't expect a big order… People sell products today and abandon their customers. It's bad business."

Embrace Frugality

Almost all great companies built during bad times also learn how to run extremely efficiently. Workers wear multiple hats, buy used furniture, and look for any way to cut costs. Tales of frugality are legendary in the tech industry. At the headquarters of Digital Equipment, the company's founders didn't even go to a garage sale. They appropriated desks that had been left by the previous tenants, and they didn't install doors, even in bathrooms, because they cost too much.

But while companies need to watch their bottom line, downturns also present an excellent opportunity to hire high-quality labor on the cheap. A lot of good talent gets laid off during downturns, and workers are more open to joining new companies since there are fewer jobs to be had in big corporations.

After the dot-com bust early this decade, Google (GOOG) took huge advantage of the surfeit of talent. At the end of 2001, Google had 281 full-time employees. By the end of 2004, the number had swelled to more than 3,000. Those employees, many of whom Google poached from big rivals such as IBM and Microsoft, allowed Google to handle and generate explosive growth. In 2001, Google earned $7 million on $86 million in sales; by the end of 2004, Google reaped $399 million in profit from $3.2 billion in sales. "When I joined Google we were the only place hiring," says Sheryl Sandberg, a former executive at Google who is now the chief operating officer of Facebook.

There's Room for Optimism

Today, when venture capitalist Moritz surveys the economy, he admits times are sobering. It was his venture capital firm that spooked the entire tech industry with a presentation, leaked on the Web, that was titled "RIP: Good Times" and detailed for startups the gloomy state of the economy. As he and others have noted, selling anything in this economy is more of a challenge. And it's harder than ever to raise money because the IPO market is dead and mergers have dried up.

Moritz nevertheless sees a lot of opportunity, and says great companies will emerge from this downturn, just as they have in the past. "Things get overblown in the Valley," he says. "As the obituaries are currently being penned, those are overstated, too. Good ideas and brilliant people will find us very willing to step out into the cold with them. It's as easy for me to be excited today by the unknown 23-year-olds as I was in the past."

Six Companies Born During Downturns

By Emily Maltby, CNNMoney.com staff writer

Think a recession is a bad time to start a company? Imagine if the founders of these major corporations had thought the same...

Rising above inflation

Company: Procter & Gamble

Ticker: PG

Industry: Household productsFounded during: The Panic of 1837

Candle maker William Procter and soap maker James Gamble joined forces to start a small household-goods business in Cincinnati. It was a risky move for the brothers-in-law: The shaky economy had a full six years of financial crisis ahead. Massive migration to the West caused land prices to rise, and inflation soon followed. Under President Martin Van Buren, bank failures and concerns about the paper economy spurred the greatest economic decline since the birth of the country. But P&G survived and went on to score lucrative contracts to supply necessities to the Union Army during the Civil War.
Status today: With $83.5 billion in revenue in 2008, Procter & Gamble has built a portfolio of some of the most recognizable brands in the U.S., including Tide, Pampers, Oral-B, Iams, Pantene, Duracell and Pringles. The company's shares took a hit this past year, but it has held steady against smaller competitors such as Johnson & Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive, and its earnings remain strong: P&G had net earnings last year of $12.1 billion. Because consumers rely on P&G products in good times and bad, it is considered a titan even in a rough economy.

Outliving a long depression

Company: IBM

Ticker: IBM

Industry: ComputerFounded during: The Long Depression, 1873-1896

Aptly named, this era comprised a series of unfortunate events. The Vienna Stock Exchange fell. The Coinage Act of 1873 demonetized silver, pushing investors away from making long-term loans. U.S. banks collapsed twice, causing the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893.
But three startups - the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Corporation - developed technologies during this 23-year period that were in demand despite the sour economy. A time clock for recording workers' hours, for example, was needed as industrial production at the end of the century surged. Also, a tabulating machine was vital during the immigration wave, to tally up the expanding population. These three companies merged in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which changed its name to IBM several years later.
Status today: If it's true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, IBM came into this recession well-fortified: Big Blue is a veteran of near-death experiences.
IBM's wild success in the 1960s led to antitrust action by the U.S. Department of Justice. The fallout from U.S. v. IBM took its toll over the next decade and radically reshaped IBM's business operations. IBM eyed oblivion again in the early 1990s, as its traditional hardware and mainframe computing business dried up. Under Lou Gerstner's leadership, IBM overhauled its business model, shifting the emphasis from products to services. Although consumers are spending less on technology in the current economy, IBM recently posted a strong quarter, which it attributed to an increased demand for its outsourcing services. Last year, the company had record revenue of $103.6 billion. However, thousands of layoffs are reportedly underway in IBM's sales and software units.

A bright idea in a financial crisis

Company: General Electric

Ticker: GEI

ndustry: Energy and otherFounded during: Panic of 1873

Kicking off the Long Depression was the Panic of 1873, which began when major investment firm Jay Cooke & Co. collapsed, causing the NYSE to shut down for days. The ensuing financial crisis lasted six years.
Sound like an ideal time to open a laboratory? That's what Thomas Edison thought as he set up a facility in Menlo Park, N.J., in 1876. There, he produced the first light bulb in 1879 - the same year the panic officially ended. Although economic conditions would remain poor until 1896, Edison had gained enough momentum to start a company he called Edison General Electric Company. In 1896, Edison's GE landed a spot on the first-ever Dow Jones Industrial Average. Today, it is the only remaining company of the original twelve. Status today: GE posted $183 billion in revenues in 2008, but its earnings were down 19%. Profits from GE's consumer and industrial segment dropped 65% during the year, and GE Capital's profits fell almost 30%. While GE's energy sector saw a modest growth in profits, the company is bracing for a rough 2009

Smooth riding through a panic

Company: General Motors

Ticker: GMIndustry:

AutomobilesFounded during: The Panic of 1907

Back in the days of President Theodore Roosevelt, before a central bank had been established, lending institutions were dependent on their own currency resources. This became a problem in 1907 when numerous large banks made a bid for controlling shares of United Copper Company. When the attempt failed, the public pulled their money from the banks, causing runs that led to the failure of many trusts and lending institutions.
These events didn't deter William Durant, a leading manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles, from trying his luck on a new technology called the automobile. He founded GM on Sept. 16, 1908 in Flint, Mich. That year, it became a holding company for Buick and Oldsmobile, which had been established several years. Historians consider the Panic of 1907, also known as the Banker's Panic, to have ended in June 1908, even though the market didn't reach pre-1907 levels until 1909. That was perfectly timed for GM, which went on to acquire many more companies in that rebound year.
Status today: Hit with a double whammy in 2008 from sky-high fuel prices and a terrible market, GM has seen its stock price fall 85% in a year. Its competitors aren't faring much better - in December, GM went to Washington with Chrysler and Ford to seek $34 billion in government loans. The company is currently under scrutiny: Iit must prove it can cut costs enough to be a viable recipient of the billions it needs to stave off bankruptcy.

Taking flight in the great depression

Company: United Technologies
CorpTicker: UTXIndustry:
AerospaceFounded during: In 1929, amid the Great Depression



The notorious year that the stock market crashed, spurring a 10-year global downturn, also marked the birth of an aerospace giant. United Aircraft and Transport Corporation beg

an life as a holding company for airlines, airplane parts manufacturers and aviation companies such as Boeing.
Most industries floundered under the financial crisis, but the Golden Age of Aviation was in full swing and kept United Aircraft aloft. In fact, the company pulled so many other businesses under its umbrella during its initial years that it quickly smacked up against antitrust laws. In 1934, Boeing and United Airlines became separate companies and United Aircraft turn

ed into what is now UTC, a diversified industrial manufacturer.


Status today: UTC reported $58.7 billion in revenue in 2008. Thanks to increased revenue at UTC's aerospace companies, profits were up in the last quarter of 2008. But orders were slow for products such as elevators and air conditioners, which is a big deal for the company that owns Otis Elevator and Carrier Corp. In the past year, UTC has laid off thousands of work

ers, and the company plans continue slashing in the early months of 2009 as it undergoes major restructuring.

Speeding around oil prices

Company: FedEx

Ticker: FDXIndustry:

Shipping Founded during: The Oil Crisis of 1973

Entrepreneur Frederick W. Smith identified a pressing business need: important documents had to reach their destinations within one or two days. He incorporated a company called Federal Express in June 1971 and began operations in 1973 from Memphis International Airport. On its first night, in April, FedEx shipped 186 packages to 25 U.S. cities.
But all was not well on the international front, and within months, several Arab states had embargoed oil exports to the United States. While this news could have been disastrous for a company that relied on petroleum-fueled transportation, Federal Express stayed alive and became profitable in July 1975, when oil prices finally leveled off.
Status today: 2008 seemed at first to be a deja-vu replay of the company's nascent years, as soaring fuel prices hurt operating costs. But when prices retreated, FedEx faced a new whammy: The weakening economy has reduced demand for prompt shipping. Average package volume for daily ground shipping dropped 2% year-over-year for the quarter ended Nov. 30. Warning that FedEx faces "some of the worst economic conditions in the company's 35-year operating history," CEO Frederick Smith took a 20% pay cut for 2009 as part of a sweeping cost-cutting plan.

Why Your Bank Is Broke

By Stephen Gandel Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009 /From Time Magazine

Even without doing the math, you probably get that the government's financial-rescue effort is failing. The signs are hard to miss. Your friend in finance got pink-slipped. A house sale down the street fell through because the buyer couldn't get a mortgage. A local bank is closing a nearby branch or maybe shutting down altogether.

But do the math, and you can begin to understand how really botched this bailout has been. Since October, the government has deposited $165 billion into the accounts of the nation's eight largest banks Yet those same financial firms are now worth $418 billion less than they were four months ago, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the government's preferred shares are worth at least $20 billion less. In Wall Street terms, that's throwing good money after bad. All told, the government's annualized rate of return on its investment in the nation's largest banks is -1,096%. That's well beyond Bernie Madoff territory; he topped out at a mere -100%.

So how could $438 billion — $418 billion of their money and $20 billion of ours — go poof, just like that? Here's the easiest explanation: our banking system has sprung a leak.
Financial firms are built on capital. They take in a dollar, borrow against it and then lend out $3, $4 or $9. Or $30. In the past few years, executives have been using thinner and thinner capital — acquisitions and questionable off-balance-sheet arrangements — to build their money pails. In good times, the more of those cheap sources of capital you use, the more profitable your bank will be.

For the past few decades, banks have been piling up risk, making more and more loans based on less and less capital. Years of economic growth, shallow recessions and record-low default rates lulled bankers into thinking that the future would resemble the immediate past, at least as far as risk went. Turns out it didn't. All it was going to take was a worse-than-average recession — and it looks as though we've got one — and many banks, including a number of the biggest ones, were bound to fail. The shockingly poor lending standards — housekeepers being approved for million-dollar mortgages — have only hastened their demise. "This crisis needs to be understood as something that has developed over the past decade," says Joseph Mason, a finance professor at Louisiana State University's E.J. Ourso College of Business. "This isn't just one black swan. It's a bunch of black swans that have hung out for a while and created a giant problem."

There's little hope that the type of shares the government is buying in banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) will plug the hole in the banking system's bucket. Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets who has written a number of reports on the capital issues of banks, says the only way to solve the problem is for the government to stop buying preferred shares and start taking direct ownership stakes. Of course, the issue with that approach is that the problem at the banks is so large, Uncle Sam may end up owning a good portion of the banking sector. Few seem to want nationalization. Unfortunately, that could be the only way out.

Playing with House Money

To understand why nationalization may be inevitable, you have to get a handle on the true source of the banks' problems. The banking business — at least the way George Bailey practiced it in It's a Wonderful Life — was all about deposits and loans. You take in deposits, on which you pay a relatively low interest rate, say 2%. Then you lend that money to other people at a higher interest rate, say 7%. Pocket the difference. Repeat. But starting in the early 1970s, banks began funding less of their lending with old-fashioned deposits. Bank deposits backed 90% of all loans four decades ago; today they back 60%. Where does the rest of the loan money come from? From the bank's past earnings and the money given to it by its investors. Using the house's money has generated higher profits — with significantly higher risks.

Regulators have long had a lower capital requirement on loans that are not backed by deposits. But in 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) removed rules that capped leverage at 15 to 1 for investment-banking firms like Goldman Sachs. That allowed the firms to vastly expand their lending activities without raising a single new dollar of capital. One big backer of the rule change was reportedly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was then Goldman's CEO. By that time, the regulatory separation between investment banks and traditional banks had long since been removed, so traditional banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America shifted more and more of their lending operations to their investment-banking divisions, and leverage took off. By the end of 2007, many banks were lending $30 for every dollar they had in the vault. "Changing the net-capital rule was an unfortunate judgement by the SEC," says former SEC official Lee Pickard. "It's one of the leading contributors to the current financial crisis."

Another way banks sought to boost their profits — at least those available to shareholders — was through stock buybacks. Investors cheer buybacks, because they shrink the number of outstanding shares, boosting a company's profits per share and usually its stock price. But corporate stock purchases also decrease banks' capital, because their earnings are used to purchase shares rather than being retained as cash. Worse, sometimes banks borrow money in order to buy back shares, upping their leverage and lowering their capital at the same time. In the past four years alone, the nation's largest banks, as defined by Standard & Poor's, have spent $300 billion buying back stock.

One of the firms leading the charge to capital-light banking was Bank of America (BofA). Starting in 1993, a predecessor firm became one of the first banks to develop and embrace computer models that were supposed to improve a bank's ability to determine the risk of a particular type of loan. After a merger in 1998 that formed the bank, BofA officials often argued to investors and regulators that these new advanced risk controls meant the bank needed to carry less capital per loan. The officials also frequently fought regulations that would boost capital requirements for them and other banks. In 1998, BofA asserted that tying capital requirements to credit ratings, which would have required banks to hold more funds in the vault to account for the riskiness of subprime loans, was silly.

And to the delight of investors, BofA was pushing for the freedom to make risky loans at the same time it was aggressively repurchasing shares. Since 1998, it has spent $62 billion on share buybacks, according to S&P. The result is that over the past decade, BofA's tangible-capital ratio — the amount of tangible equity in relation to tangible assets — has nearly halved from 5% in 1998 to 2.8% in the third quarter of 2008. It became a bank built on air. But BofA wasn't alone.

By early 2008, nearly all the big banks were poorly positioned to weather a downturn — particularly this downturn. Accounting rules demand that banks take a hit to their earnings by the value of a loan when it becomes clear a borrower is not going to pay it back. When a bank's loan losses are greater than its income, it has to take money from its shareholders' equity account to make up the difference. That's a big deal for a company's investors. If shareholders' equity is wiped out, their stock is effectively worthless. So investors watch this account intensely; if they think shareholders' equity is headed to zero, so too is a bank's stock.

FBR's Miller looked at eight of the largest financial firms in the U.S. and determined that on average, if just 3.4% of their loans go unpaid, their shareholders will be wiped out. The good news is that these firms are so large that 3% of their loan portfolio is a really big number: some $400 billion. The timing of when the loans go bad matters too. If, say, 5% of a bank's loans go bad over 10 years, the bank will survive. It can cover the loan losses with the earnings it gets from all its paying customers. But given the way banks capitalize themselves these days, if 5% of a bank's loan portfolio goes bad in a single year, the bank is toast.

The switch to doing more lending through investment-banking operations has only made matters worse. For deposit-based loans, the banks have wide discretion as to when they record a loss. Some do it after a borrower misses his first payment. Other banks wait until the loan is 120 days past due. But for loans made through a firm's investment-banking division, the bank has to reduce the value of those debts according to what similar pools of loans are worth. This is known as mark-to-market accounting. And when investors grow increasingly nervous that borrowers will not pay back their debts, as they are now, the bonds on which those loans are based plummet in value, even before payments stop coming in. As a result, banks are watching their capital bases erode much faster than their executives ever expected — and probably faster than they can handle.

Building a Better Bailout

TARP does nothing to patch the hole in the banking system. And it certainly doesn't do anything to encourage banks to make more loans. Yes, banks have gotten nearly $300 billion in money from the government, and that's a lot of dough. But it's not free dough. In return for federal cash, the government has taken preferred-stock shares as the firm's markers. Unlike common stock, which is the kind you or I would buy from a broker, preferreds have to eventually be paid back, so they are really loans, not additional capital.

Say a bank has $5 in capital and $100 in loans. Now the government gives the bank an additional $100 in preferred shares and says, "Go make more loans." Well, the bank might then have $200 in loans, but it still has only $5 in common shareholders' equity. The result: if just 2.5% of its loans go bad, the bank's shareholders are wiped out. Wisely, the largest banks in the nation lent less in the fourth quarter of 2008 than in the previous three months — a strategy that has drawn some complaints. But that hasn't removed the pressure on their shares. That's because the banks have had to continue to take loan losses. And banks don't have the option to pass those losses off on the new money they got from the government. They have to write down their common stockholders' equity first. And as that capital falls, so go the bank's shares. Some are alarmingly close to zero.

No bank's stock has fallen more in value during the past four months than Bank of America's. The combined value of its shares is now $37 billion. That's $123 billion less than they were worth at the end of September. In the third quarter, BofA was forced to write down $4.4 billion in loans, or about 1.8% of its loan portfolio. Compared with what some of its competitors wrote down, that wasn't a heck of a lot; Citigroup, for instance, had a $13.2 billion charge in the same quarter, primarily related to loan losses. But the relatively small loss took BofA's thin tangible equity, the type of capital that matters most to shareholders, down to a ratio of just 2.6% of loans, according to FBR. By that measure, Bofa was a weaker bank than any of its rivals, including Citigroup. But since the market was so focused on bad loans and the charge-offs banks had to take, no one seemed to notice BofA's faults.

That is, until the fourth quarter. In mid-September 2008, in a deal pushed by regulators, BofA agreed to buy Merrill Lynch. The acquisition actually boosted BofA's capital ratios, but it also added losses to an already fragile capital structure; Merrill Lynch lost $15 billion in the fourth quarter alone. Knowledge of the impending losses forced BofA CEO Ken Lewis to ask the government for an additional $20 billion in TARP funds — on top of the $25 billion it had already received — as well as about $100 billion in loan guarantees. Without the government assistance, BofA says, it couldn't have closed the merger.

The Merrill losses, which weren't publicly revealed until early January, have angered shareholders, some of whom have sued the company for not informing them sooner. And last week, the losses also led Lewis to ask Merrill's top executive, John Thain to resign for failing to keep BofA officials apprised of his firm's bottom-line problems. Thain says Lewis knew all along.

Cleaning Up the Mess

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who was famously early in predicting that the end of the housing boom would cause a financial crisis, estimates that continued loan losses will force U.S. banks to come up with an additional $1.4 trillion just to stave off bankruptcy. And since the banks aren't likely to earn much money or attract new investors anytime soon, much of the money will have to come from the government.

Regulators are split on what to do next. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is backing a plan to create what it calls an aggregator bank, which would buy up the loans of BofA, Citigroup and the rest of our now troubled system, theoretically putting an end to the escalating losses eating away at the banks' capital. But if the government buys those assets at current market rates, banks would be forced to take immediate losses on the sales, doing more harm than if the government just left the troubled loans where they are. Sources say the Federal Reserve would prefer to let the banks keep the loans and troubled bonds for now and instead provide the banks with insurance policies guaranteeing that the government will swallow a good deal of future credit losses. But a similar deal that the Fed struck with Citi did little to boost that company's stock or stave off fears that it may soon go under.

That's why a small but growing number of people are starting to talk about nationalization. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently said nationalization, or something close to it, is a better solution than just buying bad assets, because if the government takeovers succeed, then taxpayers get to keep the profits when they eventually resell the banks. But if the government doesn't turn a nationalized bank around, it could be very costly to taxpayers.

No matter what happens, things have definitely changed for Lewis and other former titans of the banking business. A few months ago, BofA's CEO was hailed for running a bank so prosperous that it was able to swallow mortgage lender Countrywide Financial and investment bank Merrill Lynch in the depths of the worst banking crisis in recent history. The trade magazine American Banker named Lewis Banker of the Year in December. Now he's fighting to keep his job. And even if he succeeds, he's got a new partner. The government already has a large stake in his bank, with its $45 billion in preferred shares. The government's ownership could dramatically rise if the Fed starts buying common shares of BofA, which would mean that Washington would be calling more of the shots. Increasingly, the only shareholder that matters to Bank of America and other banks is Uncle Sam. Without the government, the math of the banking business these days just doesn't add up.