By Dwight Cass
When a big stock sale would tank your shares, leak them into the market instead.
It was hard to imagine a worse time for Bank of America to issue stock. Its shareholders had just stripped Chief Executive Ken Lewis of his chairman’s title. Conflicting accounts of his clash with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury boss Hank Paulson over the terms of BofA’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch were roiling the markets. And the Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, had just told the bank that it needed $34 billion in new equity to pass its stress tests.