Now, was all that stressing about Bank of America hightailing it to New York City worth it, negative nellies? Noooo.

But don't let this news put your industrious fires out people. We've still got to diversify if we want to be an attractive, competitive city.

Bank of America's board has selected Brian Moynihan as the bank's new chief executive, spokesman Bob Stickler said this evening.

Moynihan, previously the bank's consumer banking head, will have his office in Charlotte and the bank will remain headquartered in Charlotte, Stickler said.

After Bank of New York Mellon Corp. chief executive Bob Kelly dropped out of the running on Monday, Bank of America Corp.'s board was expected to choose from two internal candidates – Moynihan and chief risk officer Greg Curl – to replace departing CEO Ken Lewis.

Lewis, 62, announced Sept. 30 that he was stepping down at year's end, ending a four-decade career at the company amid mounting criticism of his Jan. 1 Merrill Lynch & Co. acquisition. The search for his replacement, led by a six-director committee, dragged on longer than many expected, entering its 11th week on Wednesday.

Moynihan, 50, is a lawyer by training. He joined a FleetBoston predecessor in the early '90s as deputy counsel, then moved into finance jobs.

By 2004, when Bank of America bought FleetBoston, Moynihan was in charge of the brokerage and wealth management unit. He held virtually the same job at the combined new bank, and stayed in Boston. The unit, and hundreds of bank leaders, moved there.

In 2007, Moynihan was put in charge of the investment bank and charged with cleaning it up. The next year, Lewis put him in charge of leading the integration with Merrill.

In August, in another management shakeup that Lewis orchestrated, Moynihan was named head of consumer banking.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Rick Rothacker and Christina Rexrode, here.

In related news: Bank of America shareholder: Don't choose Curl or Moynihan for CEO

In barely related news: Fifth Third Bank is moving Uptown

And, lookie, the new CEO has already ticked off some members of Congress:

Another amazing investigative journalism piece of awesomeness from our friends at ProPublica — by Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger

This story is part of an ongoing investigation with NPR's Planet Money .

Almost three years since banks started taking losses that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still asking basic questions about what happened.

The SEC is conducting an information-gathering sweep of the key players in the market for collateralized debt obligations, the bundles of mortgage securities whose sudden collapse in price was at the center of the meltdown of the global banking system.

In a letter dated Oct. 22, the SEC sent what amounts to a questionnaire to a number of collateral managers, the middlemen between the investment banks that created the complex financial products and the investors who bought them.

Collateralized debt obligations are made up of dozens if not hundreds of securities, which in turn are backed by underlying loans, such as mortgages. Investment banks underwrite the structures and recruit their investors. Collateral managers, brought in by the investment banks but paid by fees from the assets, select the securities and manage the structures on behalf of the investors. CDO managers have a fiduciary duty to manage the investments fairly for investors.

Since 2005, $1.3 trillion worth of CDOs have been issued, with a record $521 billion in 2006, according to the securities industry lobbying group SIFMA. The collapse in value of mortgage CDOs triggered the 2008 financial collapse.

ProPublica and NPR have confirmed that the SEC letter was sent to several managers, although the distribution list was likely industrywide. At the height of the boom in 2006, only 28 managers controlled about half of all CDOs, according to Standard and Poor's.

Banks began disclosing the first big losses on CDOs in early 2007. The infamous Bear Stearns hedge funds ran into problems beginning that summer.  By that August, the credit markets began seizing up.  Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were among the hardest hit by losses on bad investments in mortgage-based securities and CDOs.

The SEC’s letter focuses on information regarding “trading, allocation and valuations and advisers’ disclosure,” though it also asks for other details on how the managers ran their businesses. The letter requests information on CDOs issued since Jan. 1, 2006.

The letter asks collateral managers for information about what investments they made on their own behalf and how they valued these investments. Securities experts say the letter indicates that the agency is still gathering basic information about the CDO market, despite its centrality to the banking crisis.

“One wonders why this letter, especially given the general nature of it, is just now being sent. And why wasn’t it sent several years ago, as the CDO market was exploding?” says Lynn Turner, who was the SEC’s chief accountant in the late 1990s. “It makes it look like the SEC is several years behind the markets.”

Even Wall Street executives and securities lawyers who were involved in the CDO business at its height have privately expressed surprise that the SEC was only now contacting them for such rudimentary information.

The SEC declined to comment on the letter. As a policy, a spokesman said, the agency doesn’t comment on its regulatory actions. The SEC has jurisdiction over CDO managers,and enforces rules against securities manipulation, among other violations. The letter does not use the words “inquiry” or “investigation.”

Interviews with market participants and former regulators point to several areas that the SEC might be investigating. Some managers had their own in-house investment funds and may have taken positions that were in conflict with those of the investors in the structures that they managed. In some cases, their hedge funds may have bet against the very slices of the securities they were managing on behalf of the investors in the structure.

Underwriting investment banks often had influence over the investment choices some CDO managers made, giving rise to another possible conflict of interest. The agency may be looking at whether that influence was proper or not.

“The possibility for conflicts and self-dealing is huge,” says Turner, the former SEC chief accountant.

To date, the agency has little to show for its probes into the causes of the crisis that engulfed global financial markets just over a year ago. In June 2007, Christopher Cox, then the SEC chairman, testified before Congress that the agency had “about 12 investigations” under way concerning CDOs and collateralized loan obligations and similar products. A little more than a year later, Cox told Congress that the number of investigations into the financial industry, including the subprime mortgage origination business, had ballooned to over 50 separate inquiries.

There could be multiple reasons why investigations are proceeding slowly. Such cases are complex and require enormous resources and expertise.  Regulators also face the hurdle of proving intent to defraud.

Under Cox’s stewardship, the SEC fell into disarray , and it was harshly criticized by Congress and its own inspector general, particularly for its failure to catch the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff.  The turnover of the new administration, which ushered in new leadership at the much-criticized agency, has also likely slowed efforts. In recent months, under new Chairman Mary Schapiro, the SEC has made insider-trading inquiries a high priority.

So far, there have been few indictments or civil complaints. In a sign of how long these cases can take, the mortgage company New Century Financial Corporation disclosed in March 2007 that it was the subject of an SEC investigation into possible insider stock sales and accounting irregularities. It wasn’t until last week --  Dec. 7 -- that the SEC filed a formal complaint against former executives of the company. The government’s highest-profile prosecution involving the financial collapse – the case against two managers of the Bear Stearns hedge fund for alleged securities and wire fraud – failed to gain a conviction when a jury decided that the men were simply bad businessmen rather than criminals.

Were you involved in the CDO business in the latter stages of the boom? We want to talk to you. E-mail us at CDOS@propublica.org or call us at (917) 512-0258.

Remember, back in May, when we noticed then-Mayor Pat McCrory didn't pledge that our city would cut greenhouse gases? If you missed it, here's a link to John Grooms post: 'Greenest mayors' list: Guess who's not on it?

Considering that the movers and shakers in the city keep talking about how Charlotte is going to be a hub of alternative energy companies, that seemed a little odd.

McCrory, though, refused to sign his own group’s agreement. Why? Because it doesn’t recommend nuclear power as an alternative energy source (he was employed by Duke Energy at the time, and we all know how eager Pat  has always been to embrace his inner corporate puppet) — oh, and because the agreement noted that there just may be a problem with global warming, a statement McCrory found to be “too political.”

However, only a couple weeks into his first term, Mayor Anthony Foxx plans to sign the pledge.

Charlotte will finally join more than 1,000 other cities (including Gastonia) in promising to reduce emissions as a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.

Mayor Anthony Foxx is set to sign the pledge Thursday, commiting the Queen City to meeting or beating the standards of the Kyoto Protocol.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Business Journal article, by Susan Stabley, here.

Thank you, Santa.

Swedish home-appliance manufacturer Electrolux AB will establish its North American headquarters in Charlotte, adding 738 jobs to the region. Hiring is slated to begin at the end of the first quarter.

The new headquarters will consolidate Electrolux’s offices in six locations — here and in Augusta, Ga.; Pittsburgh; Nashville, Tenn.; and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Business Journal article, by Susan Stabley, here.

Here are a few of the company's commercials:

It's about damn time.

Demolition of an abandoned department store on Albemarle Road is scheduled for this week.

A $45,000 matching grant has been awarded to the owners of the vacant Upton’s property. The funds come from the city’s Façade Improvement Grant Program, which helps businesses located in targeted revitalization corridors.

City leaders tweaked the façade grant last year by adding demolition of empty big-box retail stores as a qualified expense and opening up the areas where the grant is eligible.The program provides 50% reimbursement to commercial or industrial businesses or property owners for eligible renovation costs, the city says.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Business Journal article, by Susan Stabley, here.

It's ridiculous that we have an ABC Board, and their stupid stores, to begin with. Do you realize many other states allow you to pick up your liquor at the grocery store? What is the State of North Carolina protecting us from, and why do they think it's their place to protect us?

Give me a break. They can't even figure out that it's unethical to chow down on a liquor company's tab. (Oh, and guys, giving the money back doesn't make taking the bribe any better.)

Mecklenburg County's liquor board has some explaining to do. The ABC Board is trying to explain to state regulators at the ABC Commission why it was OK for dozens of them to take expensive steak dinners from a leading liquor wholesaler.

North Carolina is unique among the states in giving local ABC boards a monopoly on liquor. So if liquor wholesalers want their brands to get more shelf space in local stores, the distributors have to convince local ABC board members and employees, who are public officials, to stock more of one brand than another.

Two weeks ago one of the biggest liquor wholesalers doing business in the state, Diageo, treated at least 28 Mecklenburg ABC officials and spouses to drinks and dinner at Del Frisco's, one of Charlotte's best steak houses.

Read the rest of this MSNBC/ NewsChannel 36 story, by Stuart Watson, here.

WRAL has been on this story for a while. You really need to watch these videos:

That's mighty swell of them, seeing as how we taxpayers lifted the bank's greedy ass out of the gutter about a year ago. Of course, the promise came from someone who's going to be quitting in a few days.

With the White House pressuring bankers to make more loans, Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. today pledged to increase lending to small- and medium-sized businesses by at least $5 billion next year.

Chief executive Ken Lewis made the promise to President Obama at a White House meeting of top U.S. bankers.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Rick Rothacker, here.

You guys been paying attention to the economic forecast news coming out of UNC Charlotte? Here's a snippet from a recent press release:

“There continue to be very mixed signals concerning the strength of the recovery,” [John] Connaughton said. “The most troubling problem remains the financial sector. Excess reserves, which 16 months ago were less than $2 billion, now stand at nearly $1 trillion. As a result the banking sector, which is critical to recovery, remains troubled. Those enormous reserves represent money that is not being lent out to facilitate the recovery.”

Connaughton is a professor of economics in the Belk College of Business at UNC Charlotte. He has served as director of the Economic Forecast since 1981.

It's our money. Why aren't we allowed to know the name of the company?

State and local governments are packaging up to $131 million in stimulus bonds for a top-secret industrial expansion code-named Project Cardinal.

On Monday, Charlotte City Council will vote on the city’s $44.5 million allocation to the unnamed company, which is promising up to 650 jobs and a potential of $148 million in capital investment over five years.

If approved, that would add to the $13.28 million in bonds granted last month by Mecklenburg County to lure the project. State officials are contemplating assigning more than $73 million in stimulus bonds to the deal, County Attorney Marvin Bethune says.

The bonds are available thanks to a $25 billion U.S. Department of Treasury program created through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The $57.78 million in local combined Recovery Zone Facility Bonds come at no risk to the city or county. Instead, municipalities are assigned control over what businesses can have access to the bonds. The bonds are sold on the market, and the interest is exempt from federal income tax. The qualifying company must use the financing for construction or equipment in a designated recovery zone.

A formal announcement of the scope of development related to Project Cardinal is expected early next year.

Read the entire Charlotte Business Journal article, by Susan Stabley, here.

Follow Susan on Twitter. She usually live-tweets the city council meetings. The Charlotte City Council meetings also have their own hashtag: #cltcc. Of course, you could always attend the meetings yourself or watch on Channel 16 if you have Time Warner Cable.

From our friends at ProPublica.org:

Why has the administration’s $75 billion mortgage modification program shown such meager results so far? One answer has predominated in the media over the past week: Homeowners are largely to blame. Homeowners, the line goes, just can’t seem to get the necessary documents together.

In testimony to Congress on Tuesday,  executives from JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America said a majority of the borrowers who’d entered into trial modifications were in danger of being denied permanent modifications through the program because they hadn’t submitted all of the required documents. Last week, the Treasury Department released survey results from all participating servicers showing the same trend.

But the data from servicers should be viewed with skepticism, given another clear trend: Banks and other mortgage servicers are themselves not very good at managing documents.

As Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.,  put it during the hearing this morning, recounting her attempts to intercede with servicers on behalf of constituents, “Why do you lose so much?” (Waters has been pushing servicers to make loan mods, with considerable frustration, since before the program launched.)

Homeowners and advocates are full of stories of servicers misplacing documents – and have been since the start of the program, which was designed to curb surging foreclosures by giving mortgage servicers incentives to modify troubled loans. Believing the servicers’ explanation of what has gone wrong “assumes that the servicers aren’t losing things and are accurately telling borrowers what they’re supposed to send in,” said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center. “There’s no evidence to support that assumption.”

“It may well be that they believe they have” the documents, said Irwin Trauss, a lawyer who supervises the Consumer Housing Unit of Philadelphia Legal Assistance, but “they just can’t find them.”

As we reported earlier this year, judges overseeing bankruptcy cases have often bluntly criticized mortgage servicers for doing a messy job. They’ve “not done a very good job of keeping the records,” one federal California judge told us.

A Treasury spokeswoman agreed that the servicers’ track record raised questions about whether borrowers really were largely to blame, adding, “We believe the onus is on servicers to improve conversion rates.”

Some servicers acknowledge there’s a problem. In testimony to Congress on Tuesday,  a Bank of America official, Jack Schakett, listed several factors as contributing to the document difficulties. Among them were “ineffective communications with customers” and “shortcomings in document maintenance.”

Under the program’s guidelines, servicers initially approve borrowers for a three-month trial period. If the homeowner makes the payments on time, sends in the required documentation (verification of income, etc.) and meets the program’s criteria for eligibility, the servicer is supposed to convert the trial modification to a permanent one at the end of that period.

The administration has said that it aims to help 3 million to 4 million homeowners. So far, about 680,000 borrowers have started trial modifications. But as of the end of October, only about 10,000 mods had become permanent.  Treasury will reveal the numbers for November on Thursday.

The  government has being trying to address the problem. This fall, the Treasury extended the trial period from three to five months in reaction to servicers’ difficulty in completing the process. Finally, last week, Treasury officials announced a new initiative to goad servicers to produce more permanent modifications.

But the extensions of trial periods, coupled with servicers’ tendency to communicate poorly, has created its own problems and ample confusion. For borrowers who made their three monthly trial payments on time, “it’s not entirely clear what you’re supposed to do,” said Thompson.

Lynn Alexander of Wisconsin faced just that situation in September, when the third month of her trial period arrived. Alexander told ProPublica she’d submitted all the required documents, but when she asked her servicer, PHH Mortgage, why she hadn’t received the final modification, she was told a permanent modification wasn’t guaranteed and that she should continue sending in payments. (No mention was made of a new five-month period.) She then told the company that she wouldn’t continue paying until she received a permanent modification. PHH did not respond to our requests for comment.

“I didn’t want to send them a payment and then have them say, ‘No, we’re not going to modify your mortgage,’” she said. “That wouldn’t have benefited me at all. It would have just put money in their pocket.”

So Alexander stopped paying. It’s unclear what the result will be. According to the Treasury, servicers recently reported that about a quarter of borrowers did not make all of their trial payments. Alexander’s case raises the question of whether others defaulted because of a lack of clarity about the outcome, not because they couldn’t make the payments.

Alexander says she’s heard nothing from PHH since she stopped paying. “I can make the payments,” she said. “I just wish they’d send the paperwork.”

“It’s just been a nightmare,” Alexander said. PHH had already started foreclosure proceedings on her home before she began the trial mod, she says, and “I keep waiting for someone to come knocking on my door and say, ‘You’ve got to get out in 10 days.’”

We’ve been reporting on the Obama administration’s program of loan modifications, and we want to hear from homeowners who are applying for one. Tell us your story.

Further reading:

• Fired BofA employee is national heroine, Creative Loafing's John Grooms
• Bank of America Says U.S. Home Loan Modifications Top 160,000, Bloomberg's David Mildenberg

Watch these videos in full-screen and you can read Bank of America's loan modification terms. Thanks, Mike Jaeger.

Wild applause goes out to Erin Lederer, a senior at UNC Charlotte. When she noticed "Roofie Bombs" on the menu at Wild Wing Cafe, in University City, she didn't ignore the reference to the notorious date-rape drug, she mobilized her friends and got the drink yanked from the menu.

Turns out, Erin is part of the Hijas Americans group, led by local author and advocate for young Latinas, Rosie Molinary. Read more about Erin's story here.

Encourage more young women to stand strong, like Erin, by supporting Rosie's non-profit, Circle de Luz.

"I was immediately sick to my stomach," said Erin Lederer, a senior at UNC-Charlotte.

What made her sick to her stomach wasn't the food at the Wild Wing Cafe in the University area. It was the name of a drink listed on their menu.

"The idea that a drink can be a 'Roofie Bomb' is condoning rape and date rape," said Lederer.

Roofie is slang for Rohypnol, a sedative that's called the "date rape drug." The drink had been on the menu for about five months.

"I don't know why no one said anything," Lederer said. "Maybe no one said anything because they didn't think it would be worth it."

Lederer said it was worth it to her. She e-mailed everyone she knew and Wild Wing Cafe. She also asked her friends to e-mail the restaurant.

A couple of days later, the drink menus had been removed and new menus were being printed.

Read more from MSNBC.com and NewsChannel 36 here.

What's it like to be drugged with Rohypnol? Like anything else, until you've experienced it for yourself it's hard to say. But this award-winning short film will give you an idea: