If you?ve been watching with interest to see how the banking changes connected with the financial crisis will shape Charlotte?s future, you might be interested in a new Bloomberg Businessweek article focusing on Bank of America?s wealth management unit.

Near the end of the piece, we read:

For retaining brokers over the long term, the metric that matters most is the financial health of Bank of America. “The clock is clearly ticking,” says Tony Plath, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “If they don’t find a way to get earnings per share higher … . how long will his shareholders be complacent?” Plath gives CEO Moynihan “a year or two to turn it around” amid multiple obstacles, many stemming from Lewis’s acquisition of mortgage lender Countrywide. BofA is spending billions to repurchase its defective loans, while fending off lawsuits from those who bought or insured the assets. Larry Dirita, a spokesman for Moynihan, says shareholder value “depends in part on aggressively cleaning up legacy mortgage issues” as well as on the synergies from the integration of Merrill and Bank of America.

“Every day that Bank of America trades [this low] is another day closer to pressure starting to form from big shareholders and Wall Street to break the thing up,” says Greg Donaldson, chairman of Donaldson Capital Management, an investment firm based in Evansville, Ind., that holds Bank of America shares. “You win if Moynihan can pull everybody together and execute. You also win if he doesn’t, because if he doesn’t it swirls out of control and they break the thing up.” While Bank of America has a market value of $142 billion, a breakup would unlock far greater value, according to Richard Bove, a veteran analyst at Stamford (Conn.)-based Rochdale Securities. “If one were to value the multiple businesses of Bank of America based on [individual unit] values, it would be worth $53 per share,” he says. The stock now trades at $14.

Moynihan?s exploits have attracted attention from this forum in recent months.

For more of the backstory of the financial crisis?s impact on Charlotte, you might want to check out the recent book from Rick Rothacker. He described Banktown during a recent Carolina Journal Radio interview.