Bank of America could retreat from smaller markets and shrink its footprint as a disaster aversion tactic if its financial problems deepen, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Executives at the Charlotte, N.C., financial giant put the potential move on a list of emergency scenarios submitted to the Federal Reserve last year, these people said. While people close to Bank of America insist that no retreat is imminent, even the possibility of selling branches and losing customers it spent huge sums to lure underscores the depth of its problems.

One Bank of America Retreat Scenario.

Who knows if it will come to this. But if it does, how on earth could BofA continue to justify its satellite headquarters uptown? It sure seems to me that you’d consolidate the bank’s core in New York or maybe Boston if you were desperate enough to cut a presence across the country that you’d spend a large sum of money building.

But as the WSJ points out, a retreat would be more than a mere retrenchment. It would mean the dissolution of everything that made the bank more than just a bank, but a real powerhouse, carrying Charlotte along for the ride.

Among the 7,400 U.S. banks and savings institutions, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. are the only coast-to-coast giants. For the past 20 years, Bank of America and predecessor NationsBank Corp. relentlessly acquired other financial institutions in a form of manifest destiny that shook the U.S. banking industry. The 1998 takeover of BankAmerica Corp., of San Francisco, and 2004 purchase of FleetBoston Financial Corp., Boston, left the combined bank with sizable muscle in nearly every large metropolitan area in the country.

Over the course of its long expansion, Bank of America, currently the country’s second-largest bank by assets, pushed its way into every nook and cranny of the financial system. But in doing so the bank left itself more exposed than any major bank to the severe economic downturn of 2008-2009, the weak recovery since and a litany of mortgage-related lawsuits.

A reader made this observation about skyscrapers, by the way. In Charlotte’s case, this is eerily true. H/T @healing_bible @preacherskidd