SunTrust Banks

Go to Atlanta.

Truist used to be the SunTrust building.

Truist has a great bank.

You've got a Bank of America tower in Atlanta.

But I mean, there's a blueprint for that, DJ.

You know, Truist Park started as SunTrust.

And SunTrust became Truist.

And, you know, we don't think...

Anything about calling it Truist Park, though, we remember it as SunTrust in the beginning.

So there's a definite blueprint within the Braves and DBH on how to handle this.

And, you know, Synovus Park, great.

Or if you want to throw opinion out, you can do it.

Restaurants opened onto the street, shops returned, tourists and locals filled the sidewalks, but at its western end, the transformation stopped.

There, where Lincoln Road met busy Alton Road, stood a large SunTrust office building from the 1960s beside an equally unremarkable surface parking lot.

This was the property Winnett bought.

And most people had a fairly straightforward suggestion for what he should do with it.

They had transformed an abandoned power station in London into Tate Modern, and they were developing a reputation for buildings that could take something familiar and make you look at it differently.

And that appealed to Winnett.

Another condition Winnett had was that he did not want to erase the existing SunTrust building.

He wanted to somehow make it part of a larger composition.

You cannot get rich with a weather vane.

Given the amount of capital in the banking industry, do you think that more banks should be buying back significant amounts of their stock like SunTrust versus just the token amounts that they're buying back or just the authorized amounts? And then also related question in banking, are banks too focused on goodwill amortization when declining to buy other banks for cash, thereby using purchase accounting versus the normal practice in the industry of pooling accounting even when the stock that they issue may be depressed or undervalued?

Well, the first question about the capital in the industry, you really have to look at that on a bank-by-bank basis.

And there is a lot more repurchasing of shares by banks taking place.

You mentioned SunTrust, but National City is they bought back, I think, 5% of their National City of Cleveland bought back 5% of their stock in the first quarter.

There's much more repurchasing going on, and that's simply a judgment call by management as to the level of capital they need going forward and what level of capital enables them to earn the return on equity that they think appropriate and what they feel like paying for their own shares.

So I think you have to look at that on case by case.

Truist is no longer around here, and that was a 30-plus year relationship that goes back because they were something before they were Truist.

Yeah, SunTrust and

SunBank.

So they lost that.

Yeah.

So I was working at SunTrust Bank, now they're Truist, and I was in their repo department.

So I was taking calls.

You can't get in repo.

But instead...

The baseball company, real estate company, allowed naming rights, and the SunTrust Bank merged with BB&T Bank, and they came up with perhaps the dumbest name in corporate America, Truist.

It's not true.

It's Truist.