Senior Research Fellow Walker Todd was quoted in Friday's Cleveland Plain Dealer in the business section:

An outright sale of National City seems inevitable, unless the federal government buys an ownership stake in the bank, said Walker Todd, former assistant general counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Mass.

Todd encouraged the U.S. Treasury, which is considering buying into U.S. banks as a confidence-booster, to make National City "the poster child" for such a program.

"It would strengthen the future of the bank in the short run," he said. Plus National City could still be sold years from now if the government didn't recoup its investment.

"I think it will happen by the end of the month," he said. "If National City's still around by the end of the month, I think they'll get a capital injection. And I hope they're around by the end of the month."

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