Ed Morrison · Confronting Daberko’s legacy

October 25th, 2008

It looks to me that David Daberko left one heck of a legacy.

The Washington Post reported yesterday: a Cleveland institution has fallen.

NCB cratered largely due to a misguided strategy to pursue the subprime market. One commentator notes:

While it’s true that the weakened housing and credit markets made the most dramatic impact on National City in 2007, the crime for which it now faces the gallows was committed in 1999. That’s when former chief executive David Daberko changed the bank’s business mix by accumulating higher-yielding, but riskier, loans (most notably subprime mortgage loans).

As Bill Callahan has documented, commercial banks’ subprime strategies dismantled twenty years of development in Cleveland neighborhoods in a matter of months. From yesterday’s Washington Post:

Last year alone, 8,000 homes went into foreclosure in the city, whose population has shrunk below 450,000. With tax collections shriveling and a recession looming, the city is in its worst shape in years.

Misguided meddling in local and statewide politics gave us the Greater Cleveland Partnership’s laughably deceptive “Learn and Earn” casino proposal and pushed Tim McCormack, a persistent critic of the business leadership, out the door — as McCormack believed at the time — to prepare the way for a convention center. Read more.

(Looks like McCormack was pretty much right about that one.)

And Daberko walked away with a nice severance.

(Graphic from this story at the Dayton Daily News.)

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Category: Economic Development
5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Confronting Daberko’s legacy”

  1. TimFerris Says:
    October 25th, 2008 at 5:14 pm

    So, Ed, this is the situation as it is right now. Where do you think it’s headed, or is that asking way too much right here right now?

    How can people begin to think this through?

  2. Ed Morrison Says:
    October 26th, 2008 at 8:23 am

    Who knows? http://snurl.com/4plvm

    It seems to me that we are set up for a modern inflationary depression (rising unemployment, falling incomes, rising prices), but I don’t think about it much.

    My thoughts:

    1. Deleverage
    2. Invest in education (your own)
    3. Learn Internet — i.e., Web 2.0 — skills (wealth will be created there first)

  3. Mark W. "Some Guy on Bridge" Schumann Says:
    October 28th, 2008 at 2:38 pm

    By that standard, Ed, I’m positioned to win. But I still think “Web 2.0″ is… vague and fluffy.

  4. Ed Morrison Says:
    October 28th, 2008 at 6:36 pm

    Web 2.0 Not really…It’s a set of powerful, increasingly integrated tools…Obama is using these tools with great effect…nothing fluffy about it.

  5. Phil Hussein Lane Says:
    October 28th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

    I started my first business in Slavic Village in 1988. I had been on my own before, several times, but this time I knew I would not be coming in from the cold, to work as an employee ever again. From E.72, a series of shop locations led me to East Cleveland, where I fought for 10 years. I was, and am, the embodiment of an urban entrepreneur, not like the effete hucksters I met who spill martinis and blather away their fathers’ fortunes. Every time I come back from adversity, I’m stronger and smarter and angrier. Through it all, National City Bank steadfastly refused to consider my business as anything of worth. I’m forging ahead, while the scions of wealth weep for their beach homes. Fuck’em.