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.”
.. “The existence of the law of gravity does not mean men cannot create an airplane,” he wrote. “However, an airplane must be created within the context of the law of gravity. At BB&T, we believe in being ‘reality grounded.’”
.. Mr. Allison—in his final year as CEO—maintained that bad banks should fail and bad borrowers should lose their homes.
.. Under Mr. Allison, BB&T’s shares outperformed the S&P 500 by 100 percentage points.