By By Bankers

With the BofA stock price tumbling to the point where it will soon be worth bupkus, it leaves me wondering about the future of Charlotte. Charlotte is nothing if not the home of big banking.  So what does Charlotte become if Moynihan and company dribble off into the miasma. Where do dead banks go, I wonder? Is there some bank hell where the old banks and their accompanying bankers live on, mumbling about their lost opportunities??

I don’t see Charlotte becoming another silicon valley. That needs people with energy and imagination . . . oh and some serious smarts, characteristics not normally associated with banking.  Manufacturing??? Hmmm, what would we manufacture? I suppose we could build a paper reprocessing plant to convert all those old bank deposit slips into, say toilet paper.

How about call centers??? With all the unemployed banking people wandering the streets of Charlotte, maybe we could bring back some of that business we shipped off to Bangalore. Ex-bankers would be great at telling callers to “please remain on the line, your call is very important to us, so kindly listen to our Muzak while we attend to real business.”

But then I thought out of the box. I thought about Italy and all its attendant debt problems, and then it came to me. The Mafia.

Yeah, that’s it. What a great fit. We could contact some folks in Sicily, ask them if they would be interested in setting up business in Charlotte. They could move into the same offices vacated by Mr. Moynihan & Co. I mean, the Bank of America building has got to be better than what they have in Sicily, especially with those nasty IMF folks breathing down everyone’s throat.  

And the mafiosas’ wouldn’t even have to be retrained.  They’re already in the two main businesses run by the BofA—loan sharking and gambling. So, they could just move right in and take over the Countrywide crap that’s choking the country. And, you know, it might be refreshing to have the customers able to deal with real professionals when they default on their home mortgages, and someone is needed to kneecap them. I mean BofA guys were such amateurs at the game . . .

Always thinking . . .

And on another exoplanet, it is rumored that Governor Rick Perry  has declared that all income taxes are patently illegal and unconstitutional, and that, when he is elected President, he will finance all federal government operations by holding bake sales. He’s hoping that Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin will serve as co-chairs of his bake sale committee, them being, you know, persons of the female persuasion.