On the afternoon of Aug. 23, Gary G. Lynch, the global chief of legal, compliance, and regulatory relations for Bank of America, was attending a meeting in Washington when the floor heaved. Although Lynch, a lanky 61-year-old attorney with swept-back white hair, had never experienced an earthquake, he possessed the good sense to get beneath a sturdy conference table, along with several other people. “If the ceiling came down,” he recalls, “I thought we were dead.”
The ceiling held, despite the magnitude 5.8 quake rippling from its epicenter in Virginia. Minutes later, Lynch pulled out his BlackBerry and discovered another startling development: a rumor rattling Wall Street that Bank of America might get swept into an involuntary, government-orchestrated rescue by its smaller rival JPMorgan Chase. “This is really getting nuts,” he thought.
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