First, we write a splendid story about starting an American bank to help immigrants and the working poor.
Second, we accept all the bailout money we can get our hands on, and agree to merge with some investment bank. When things get tough, we complain loudly and say, “Boo hoo, they made us do the merger.”
Next, we will get caught by banking regulators for not having enough capital (which means cash).
Then, we will think hard to figure out where we can find some cash. Oh! Here’s an idea: We can just take some cash from our account holders. We can write them a truly passionate letter explaining our love for them and how we plan to honor them by doing something that involves using enough words to cover an entire page of paper. No wait, two pages! On page 2 we’ll announce our plan to take their money from them; not in a bad way, just $20 every month.
Someone will probably whine about the $20, so we’ll say we can waive this fee if they dump $10,000 more of their cash into their account, and never use it; only we get to use their money.
Let’s see, how many customers do we have anyway? Google says more than 21 million of our customers use online banking, so
that’s $20 a month multiplied by at least 21 million customers, equals $420 million per month. Hmmm …
We want to be Bank of America for three months!
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