You can forget the days when you had a personal relationship with your banker. It’s a commoditized business with free-checking and no ATM fees. The government more or less controls the too-big-to fail banks. In what’s being called a “major win” for the government, Bank of America has been found liable for fraud related to loans made by its Countrywide unit in ’07 and ’08. Stay tuned for more cases now that the precedent is set. Then there’s J.P. Morgan’s settlement to the tune of $13 billion with the Justice Department. Some thanks J.P. gets for agreeing to the government bailout it didn’t want to participate in back in ’08. Today the TBTF banks are an extension of the government, and they’re too scared to move. Their recent stock market success looks to me like a dead cat bounce.
