President-elect met Monday with John A. Allison IV, a fierce champion of free markets
.. As chief executive of BB&T Corp., he distributed copies of Ms. Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” to senior officers and influenced BB&T’s charitable arm to fund classes about the moral foundations of capitalism at a number of colleges.
.. He also has said that bank regulations that came out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act are too onerous, and proposed significantly raising capital levels as a way to weed out bad banks.
.. Mr. Allison was unafraid to criticize his rivals or his regulators. In an interview during his final weeks as BB&T CEO, he complained that “til really very recently, we were told over and over that if we just had as good a risk management (model) as Wachovia, then we would do very well.”
.. “A lot of folks didn’t understand the conservatism of BB&T until the crisis, but they appreciated it after.”