B of A-Intern Stories Show Just How Far Banks Have Sunk

Things are bad, very bad, for the large banks when the Atlantic magazine runs this headline: "Did Bank of America's Long Hours Kill a Summer Intern?"

No longer are the mega banks getting hit for financial-related stuff — kicking people out of their homes, manipulating interest rates, abetting drug king pins — they are murdering their interns.

(To see more posts from Barb Rehm's Blog, click here.)

If this story were in the New York Post, yes bank executives could dismiss it. But the Atlantic isn't a tabloid. It tackles big, weighty topics like Middle East peace and education reform.

By the time I saw the story midday Tuesday, it already had 21,000 views. It had been tweeted 53 times and 211 readers had "liked" it on Facebook.

The story started on a website called Wall Street Oasis and has appeared in the British papers (the 21-year-old intern worked in London): The London Evening Standard and The Times of London.

It hopped the Atlantic and was covered by the Huffington Post and was on Politico's Morning Money email this morning.

It's the perfect example of the piling on that occurs when you're down, when you're not trusted, when no one wants to give you the benefit of the doubt.

It's a dangerous place to be.