Florida’s Long Road to Recovery
When John Kanas arrived in South Florida last May as the savior of the state’s largest homegrown bank, the $12.8 billion-asset BankUnited in Coral Gables, he did so with a wad of private-equity cash in his back pocket, a cushy loss-sharing agreement with regulators and a healthy dose of realism that “even our worst fears about the Florida market would be overly optimistic.”
