Bankers: our best and brightest

I have been gratified to see the torrent of end of decade retrospectives, many from newspapers and magazines on the web, pointing out how awful the decade has been on the reputations of most of our institutions and their leaders. I've been harping on that for some time now. No body's rep survived the Double Zeros.

So let's look at bankers, the super remunerated captains of finance who were so brilliant they had to be paid ka-zillions or they would go work for someone else.

Right now they are racing to beat the clock before the new banking regulations go into effect so they can replace the $50 billion they will lose when certain business practices are banned. They intend to change their rules, charge new fess, and anything else they can think of. In many cases you will pay a fee for having a credit card and another fee for having a checking account. This must be true for I read it in the Wall Street Journal.

The interesting part of this article though is this:

The changes come against a backdrop of rising anger at the nation's banks—having been largely supported by hundreds of billions of public bailout dollars in late 2008 and 2009. One recent survey by Chicago's Bank Administration Institute found that 43% of retail-bank executives feel that consumer trust in banks has eroded in the past six months.

ONLY 43% of these guys think the public is losing faith in them!!!!. What's wrong with the other 57%? Delusional? Out of touch? Vacationing in the Tuva Republic?

Or are they simply the smart ones who figured that the public faith in banks had eroded as far as it could erode long ago?