On Wednesday, Beleaguered Bank of America Corp announced that by the year's end, its Chief Executive Ken Lewis will retire. The bank informed that it has yet to determine who would be the new CEO.

However, the board of the largest U. S. bank will keep on interviewing deserving candidates.

Yesterday, 62 year-old Lewis said that he would step down from the post of chief executive officer at the end of the year, leaving his successor to capitalize on, or salvage, the acquisitions that led to his downfall. If adhered to CreditSights Inc. analyst David Hendler, after the CEO engineered the $29 billion takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. in January and bought subprime home lender Countrywide Financial Corp. in 2008, he has become a distraction and denounced by regulators and lawmakers.

The good times for the Bank of America began when Lewis took over in April 2001 and helped it to triple in size along with becoming biggest U. S. lender by assets and deposits. A sum of over $130 billion was spent by him on acquisitions.

Lewis purchased Countrywide, the nation's biggest home lender in the worst housing slump since the 1930s and also accepted to pay $29 a share for Merrill Lynch, the world's largest brokerage a year ago, when financial markets teetered near collapse. Following this, the U. S. economy contracted for four quarters, including a 6.4 percent contraction of gross domestic product in the first three months of this year.