So, a couple of days ago, Ben Bernanke got served, with a subpoena to produce the Fed’s documentation related to the Bank of America/Merrill deal. If it is like most deals I’ve been familiar with, we presume they’ll be turning over 50 boxes of paperwork punctuated with receipts for a lot of Red Bull and Chinese takeout, and then some congressional intern is gonna get locked in a closet with all that crap. Sucks to be that guy. In the meantime, the FT has gotten a hold of one of Benny’s emails, and it goes a little something like this:

Ken Lewis, chief executive of Bank of America, used the threat of invoking a “material adverse change” clause to break off his agreement to buy Merrill Lynch last December because he wanted to negotiate a lower price, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke claimed in an e-mail.

Mr Lewis, who is scheduled to testify about the matter on Thursday at a congressional hearing, only dropped his threat after being told by former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson that regulators, including Mr Bernanke, would remove him and his board if BofA tried to invoke the “MAC” clause.

The Financial Times has learned that Mr Bernanke, in an e-mail, described Mr Lewis’s threat to invoke the “MAC” clause as a “bargaining chip”, and a “foolish move”, before concluding that “the regulators will not condone it”.

In other words, to quote Busta and ODB, Bernanke and the regulators got BAC all in check. Merrill had a terrible Q4, and yeah, the whole point of calling a MAC is to negotiate a lower price, because something has happened that has made you realize you are buying crap. When Bernanke called it “foolish,” he could have only been talking about it being foolish for Ken Lewis’ self-preservation because Hank and Ben had Kennay by the short hairs. Terrible for shareholders, but hopefully everyone in their right minds had sold BAC stock by this time anyway.

(Underlying image credit: Euromoney)