PBS - FRONTLINE - "Breaking the Bank"

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In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Bush's War) draws on a rare combination of high-profile interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky merger, and the government's new role in taking over -- some call it "nationalizing" -- the American banking system.

It all began on that fateful weekend in September 2008 when the American economy was on the verge of melting down. Then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, his former protégé John Thain, and Ken Lewis, one of the most powerful bankers in the country, secretly cut a deal to merge Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.

The merger of the nation's largest bank and Merrill Lynch was supposed to help save the American financial system by preventing the imminent Lehman Brothers bankruptcy from setting off a destructive chain reaction. But it became immediately clear that it had not worked. Within days, the entire global financial system was collapsing.

In Washington, Secretary Paulson was determined to spend billions of government dollars to prevent the American banking system from dragging the country into a depression. That October, Lewis, Thain and other top bank CEOs found themselves at an emergency meeting at the Treasury Department. Paulson told the group they had no choice but to accept $125 billion of capital from American taxpayers in order to save the financial system. Initially, Bank of America's CEO Lewis was supportive of the plan. "We are so intertwined with the U.S. that it's hard to separate what's good for the United States and what's good for Bank of America," Lewis tells FRONTLINE.

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