March 25 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama plans to meet this week with chief executive officers of the biggest U.S. banks, stressing a need for shared goals to revive the economy, an administration official said.
Citigroup Inc.’s Vikram Pandit, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein are likely to attend the March 27 meeting, the official said yesterday. Executives from Morgan Stanley and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. will be among 12 banks represented at the meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Obama wants to stress to the executives that everyone in the country must look beyond their short-term interests and focus on the larger goal of reviving the U.S. economy and ensuring future prosperity.
“It looks like it’s going to be an encouragement to the banks, telling them to get on board and let’s get with the plan and show the American public that you’re doing it,” said Frederic Dickson, who helps oversee $20 billion as chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Administration officials set up the meeting as Obama pushes a strategy to stabilize the financial system, according to the administration official. The Democratic president is making regulatory reform a centerpiece of his economic agenda in an effort to combat the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and help prevent future declines. Senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett will take part, an administration official said.
The March 27 meeting was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.
Geithner’s Plan
Bank stocks, which have tumbled in the past year, rebounded in the last two weeks amid growing confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s program to unfreeze credit markets. The 24-company KBW Bank Index has jumped 54 percent since March 6, paring its loss over the last 12 months to 67 percent.
Geithner outlined the Public-Private Investment Program on March 22, designed to provide $75 billion to $100 billion to finance private investors’ purchases of devalued loans and securities. He will speak March 26 at a meeting of executives hosted by the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington-based trade group that lobbies on behalf of banks, a person familiar with the meeting said.
The president has urged Congress to quickly give the Treasury Department expanded powers to seize failing non-bank financial institutions that threaten the economy.
Helping Banks
The U.S. Treasury in October injected more than $120 billion from the Trouble Asset Relief Program into nine of the biggest U.S. banks, including Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo & Co. Bank of America received additional aid in January to help complete the Merrill Lynch purchase.
Spokespeople at JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, Citigroup, the third-biggest, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, the fourth-largest, and Pittsburgh-based PNC, ranked seventh, declined to comment. Bank of America, which bought Merrill Lynch & Co. this year, declined to comment through spokesman Scott Silvestri. Lucas van Praag, a Goldman Sachs spokesman, didn’t reply to a request for comment.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kim Chipman in Washington at kchipman@bloomberg.net ; Julianna Goldman in Washington at jgoldman6@bloomberg.net
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