The Securities and Exchange Commission can’t get its story straight.
The agency talked tough earlier this month when it filed a second complaint against Bank of America. The bank, it claimed, “erroneously and unreasonably” chose not to disclose to its shareholders the extent of Merrill Lynch’s “extraordinary” and “monumental” losses before they voted on the bank’s plan to acquire Merrill. By keeping silent about this “disastrous performance,” BofA “kept shareholders in the dark” and “deprived them of essential information.” Bank of America’s failure to disclose Merrill’s losses, the SEC alleged, was as “false and misleading” as its calculated silence about the $5.8 billion it set aside for Merrill bonuses, which is the subject of the first SEC complaint against the bank.
