Topic: Financial Crisis
Case Study Requirements:
The attached case study is case 14 from the textbook “Strategic Management: Concepts, 1st ed.” McGraw-Hill Irwin Publishing, 2013 (SBN: 978-0077324452).
The paper should include an introduction and answer the following five questions from the attached case study. To answer these questions, other sources (books, journals, library reference materials) could be used. A minimum of 10 sources are required and all citations need to be included in the list of references with appropriate APA formatting.
Required Outline:
1) Introduction
2) What should integration look like? Which activities should stay and which should be spun off? What redundancies should be eliminated? Should the bank go with a single brand and image, or take advantage of the equity that remains in the Merrill Lynch name? Will foreign countries embrace the bank as readily if it renames Merrill Lynch’s worldwide operators as Bank of America?
3) As the bank continues to grow in the future, what competencies should it rely on? Should innovation and service continue to be the building blocks of its future competitive advantage, or have the changes brought about by the financial crisis rendered them less effective going forward? How could these strengths be combined with what Merrill Lynch and Countrywide have to offer?
4) How could the company grow in the future? With the number of annual bank failures still quite high, plenty of acquisition targets exist, but do their discounted prices merit taking on even more financial distress? How healthy does Bank of America have to be in order to consider additional purchases?
5) What risk-management mechanism where in place to prevent such massive losses? And why where they ineffective? To what extent did corporate strategy and compensation incentives promote unnecessary risk-taking?
6) How can situations like the 2008 financial crisis be avoided in the future?
No. of pages; 5
