Merrill Strikes Back!

Merrill downgraded Bank of America in a desperate bid to save face in the analyst earnings downgrade wars! I guess somebody at Merrill got the tap and was told to do some downgrade of some bank or broker. Any bank or broker, just downgrade somebody for the love of God! So BAC was downgraded to a "sell" from "neutral" by Merrill. Furthermore, according to the link above, Fox-Pitt (Who? Never heard of 'em) slashed estimates at Lehman and Goldman. Goldman predicted that the banking industry was carrying around $460 billion of credit losses, of which they had only come clean on $195 billion, essentially coming as close as it could to downgrading itself.