Folks working for Bank of America, especially in San Francisco, probably can't wait for this week to be over.
First off, there was that prank turning dozens of BofA ATMs in the city into "automated truth machines."
As part of its campaign to "track all the ways BoA is bankrupting America," Rainforest Action Network activists last weekend taped over the checking, savings and deposit interface on 85 ATMs with look-alike options such as "bankroll climate change" and "fund executive bonuses." The stickers also urged BofA customers to "stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly."
On Tuesday, in fact, customers, much to their chagrin, were stopped from doing businesses at BofA locations citywide, as well as in much of the Bay Area and other parts of the country, when its ATMs went down. This, however, turned out not to be the handiwork of activists, but a network failure traced to Verizon.
"Some enterprise customers may have experienced a service interruption (of about an hour and a half) when a configuration error was made on one of the data networks," explained a Verizon spokeswoman.
Certain activists might be pleased to know that other big businesses were hit by the failure, including Walmart and Morgan Stanley.
Today, BofA reports its latest earnings, a tensely anticipated event these days, given the bank's myriad woes (e.g., from Wednesday: "BofA shrinking assets leaves $2.8 billion hole in profit target" - Bloomberg).
Analysts expect the report to be better than last quarter, but who knows? The same analysts were wrong about Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase earnings.
On to Friday, and, boy, does Occupy SF have a treat in store for BofA. Its daylong "direct action protest" against "Wall Street West" - i.e., San Francisco's Financial District - is set to end up with "a lively street party," according to organizers, right outside the Bank of America building at 555 California St.
Sober reminder: For all the upbeat economic news Mayor Ed Lee has been touting about the city, a report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which he attended this week, may be a bit of a comedown.
It will take until 2016, at least, for San Francisco and the surrounding metropolitan area to regain the jobs it lost at the depth of the downturn. Same goes for median household income, according to a conference report.
The report, prepared by IHS Global Insight, projects a sluggish 1.4 percent job growth - equivalent to roughly 26,000 new jobs - for the San Francisco area (including Alameda County), between now and the end of the year.
San Francisco is one of 80 metropolitan areas, out of the 363 surveyed, that will wait as long as five years to be back where they started. San Jose/Silicon Valley is expected to recover by 2014.
While San Francisco's median household income has continued to decline, at $73,000 a year it's a lot better than the average in the country - $49,500, as of 2010. That's 7 percent lower than it was in 1999.
"This decline has been even steeper for those in lower income groups, leading to increased income inequality and deteriorating financial stability for many Americans," the report says. ( sfg.ly/wEnP4g).
Way down: San Francisco ranks 187th in terms of economic growth, according to the Brookings Institution, putting it among the "weakest" of the 200 metropolitan areas surveyed worldwide - much weaker than San Jose (61) and a little better than Sacramento (196). And no, we did not beat L.A. (146).
Apart from Houston and Dallas, the 57 U.S. metro areas didn't do well at all. Almost all of the fastest-growing metro economies are outside North America and Western Europe.
"A network of trading metros across the globe, particularly in developing Asian, Latin American and Eastern European nations, is setting the pace in an uneven recovery," says the report, which analyzed 2010-11 data on GDP, employment and income growth.
Strongest metro of all: Shanghai. ( www.brookings.edu/globalmetromonitor).
Bank of America was also a target of Occupy Congress protesters Tuesday in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Photo: Karen Bleier / AFP/Getty Images
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