AP Giannini and the Bank of Italy - April 18 2006
- From: Felix Tilley <ftilley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:58:07 -0700
Is San Francisco going to celebrate the founder of the Bank of Italy? It
is known today as the Bank of America. It's HQ is no longer in
California.
I fot this from time.com. This post is incomplete. Google AP Gianinni
for the full post.
BANK OF AMERICA/AP Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini in 1929
Amadeo Peter Giannini Consumer banking owes a big debt to a produce seller
who refused to say no By DANIEL KADLEC
Intro: Big Wheels Turning 21st Century: The Future of Business
Monday, Dec. 7, 1998 Like a lot of folks in the San Francisco area, Amadeo
Peter Giannini was thrown from his bed in the wee hours of April 18, 1906,
when the Great Quake shook parts of the city to rubble. He hurriedly
dressed and hitched a team of horses to a borrowed produce wagon and
headed into towto the Bank of Italy, which he had founded two years
earlier. Sifting through the ruins, he discreetly loaded $2 million in
gold, coins and securities onto the wagon bed, covered the bank's
resources with a layer of vegetables and headed home.
In the days after the disaster, the man known as A.P. broke ranks with his
fellow bankers, many of whom wanted area banks to remain shut to sort out
the damage. Giannini quickly set up shop on the docks near San Francisco's
North Beach. With a wooden plank straddling two barrels for a desk, he
began to extend credit "on a face and a signature" to small businesses and
individuals in need of money to rebuild their lives. His actions spurred
the city's redevelopment.
That would have been legacy enough for most people. But Giannini's mark
extends far beyond San Francisco, where his dogged determination and
unusual focus on "the little people" helped build what was at his death
the largest bank in the country, Bank of America, with assets of $5
billion. (It's now No. 2, with assets of $572 billion, behind Citigroup's
$751 billion.)
Most bank customers today take for granted the things Giannini pioneered,
including home mortgages, auto loans and other installment credit. Heck,
most of us take banks for granted. But they didn't exist, at least not for
working stiffs, until Giannini came along.
A.P. was also the architect of what has become nationwide banking in the
1990s — although parochial interests prevented him from realizing it in
his lifetime. His great vision was that a bank doing business in all parts
of a state or the nation would be less vulnerable to any one region's
difficulties. It would therefore be strong enough to lend to troubled
communities when they were most in need.
That same model is applied today in international banking. And his vision
has been playing out on a national scale for the past 20 years. Fittingly,
the first bank in the U.S. to have branches coast to coast is that same
Bank of America, which accomplished the feat just this year through its
$48 billion merger with NationsBank of Charlotte, N.C.
A.P. Giannini was born in San Jose, Calif., in 1870, the son of immigrants
from Genoa, Italy. His father, a farmer, died in a fight over a dollar
when A.P. was seven. His mother later married Lorenzo Scatena, a teamster
who went into the produce business. Young A.P. left school at 14 to assist
him, and by 19 he was a partner in a thriving enterprise, built largely on
his reputation for integrity. At 31 he announced that he would sell his
half-interest to his employees and retire, which he did. But then fate
intervened, and his real career began.
--
Felix Tilley
MAJ, LARTvocate
Fanatic Legions
1-800-555-LART
.
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