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The Federal Reserve gave it’s stamp of approval to Bank of America to complete their acquisition of Countrywide Financial Corp. After the announcement Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, said that the deal would close in the 3^rd quarter of 2008.

If I had to guess, there were many in Bank of America’s headquarters praying the Fed would save their bacon and kill this deal. When the deal to buy Countrywide was announced, the market was in better shape, and the carnage in the ranks of management at the major banks had not occurred.

Now heads of Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, and other banks have been axed over bad deals. Will this lead to the end of Ken Lewis’s reign over BoA? Some industry analysts think so.

Bank of America has dropped 17 percent since the takeover was disclosed in January on concern about the deepening U.S. housing slump’s impact on Calabasas, California-based Countrywide, which ran short of cash last year. Writedowns of $10 billion to $12 billion tied to Countrywide’s home loans are likely, Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Edward Najarian said in a report yesterday.
“If Ken Lewis pulls the trigger on Countrywide, he’s going to lose his job,” Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a Torrance, California-based research firm, said in an interview today. “It’s so early in the cycle of this housing downturn, you almost know that they are going to go wrong.”  via Bloomberg.com

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