I Am John Galt Read Online Free PDF

loans that supported a cancerous housing bubble, BB&T resisted temptation and wrote only conventional mortgages.
    Yet after Congress enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), banking regulators forced even healthy banks to take government money, that is, to accept the government as a shareholder. That meant committing to pay the government hundreds of millions in preferred dividends, and giving up valuable warrants so that the government could later purchase common stock at fire-sale prices. Adding insult to injury, Allison had to sign a waiver that allowed the government to unilaterally change the terms of his compensation from the company he’d served for 38 years.
    But he had no choice. BB&T was a strong bank, with more than enough capital and more than enough liquidity to see it through the crisis, and a strong loan portfolio. Yet his banking examiner from the federal government told him that the rules had suddenly changed.
    According to Allison, “They called us and said, ‘Okay, we’ve had these capital rules forever, and you guys got a lot more capital based on those rules. But we’ve decided we’re going to have some new capital rules. And based on these new capital rules, we don’t think you have enough capital. Now, we don’t know what the rules are, but we’re confident that if you don’t take the TARP money, you won’t have enough capital.’” 1
    Allison knew that the bank examiner was just a messenger boy for his bosses in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Reserve under chairman Ben Bernanke was desperate to save a few insolvent megabanks, even if the entire banking system had to pay the bill do it.
    Allison says, “There were three large financial institutions in serious trouble in the capital markets.” Presumably he means Citigroup, Bank of America, and General Electric Credit. But Bernanke didn’t want to reveal to the public how weak these three really were—so all banks would be forced to take TARP money. “He felt like if he forced all the large banks, all the $100 billion banks and over, to participate, the market couldn’t figure it out. . . . It was a huge rip-off for healthy banks.”
    Allison signed. He had to. He had adamantly opposed TARP when it was being debated. He thought it was wrong. He thought it was unfair. He thought it was unnecessary. But he had to sign. A Southerner who often expresses himself in gracious understatement, Allison says, “To be forced to do that with 30 days left in your career, on something you were adamantly opposed to in the first place, was not much fun.”
    For Allison, it all had a certain sense of déjà vu. Specifically, as he puts it, “It is right out of Atlas Shrugged . I mean, it’s eerie. It is eerie. It is eerie.”
    And Allison should know. All his life he has been inspired by Atlas Shrugged and the other works of Ayn Rand. He explicitly created BB&T’s management philosophy on Randian principles of Objectivism, and for decades he has required all BB&T executives to read Atlas Shrugged .
    BB&T is the bank that Atlas built. Its success, and its durability in a crisis that destroyed so many other banks, is testimony to the real-world, real-money impact of Rand’s value system: purpose, reason, and self-esteem. The crisis itself is testimony to the real-world consequences of the philosophy of Rand’s villains—the looters, the power seekers, and the altruists.
    Like Rand’s greatest hero, John Galt, Allison chose to walk away from the looters’ world at the height of his powers. He started eyeing the exit after the 2002 passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. He says, “That was kind of a precipitating event, where you were considered to be a criminal if you were in business, and that things were considered fraud that were just honest business mistakes. I mean just the whole tone changed—criminalization of honest business