So Ken’s calling it a day. Will whoever takes his place fill his shoes and walk the extra mile or simply quake in his shadow?

Ken Lewis was part of Wall Street’s old guard. Odd, considering BofA is from Charlotte, North Carolina, not New York. But talent’s thin on the ground on Wall Street, so they have to take what they can get.

Some might say given the events of recent time, talent was never a commodity in banking. And you’d find the majority agreeing with you.

So here’s a chance to junk the old and build a brave, post-apocalypse bank, a New Dawn. Well, a new Sallie to be precise…

Playing politics, not risk management

CEO Ken Lewis’s surprise exit may well not have not been so sudden as first thought. Back in August, BofA hired Citi CFO, Sallie Krawcheck to run BofA’s brokerage business.

Sallie does brokerage well, she did a good job in that role in Citi, but many feel that as CFO, she was in over her head. Not then an obvious attribute for running a bank as big as BofA. But what can you do when Bob Diamond’s not taking your calls?

Banking’s seizure – followed by atrophy

OK, consider this. You run a major business. You’re doing very well. You can employ exactly the people you want, pay them more than most people could ever dream about. Suddenly, it all falls over. big time.

But you don’t go bust, out of the blue there’s someone to give you money to stay afloat. More money than you could ever imagine someone could offer you.

All you had to do was name a figure and TARP was there for you. What do you do next?

Do you take the opportunity to analyse where you went wrong, kick out the practices that failed and those responsible and think of a better way of serving your customers?

Or do you sit there like rabbits caught in the headlights, sitting on the money until natural organic market gains sees it grow even bigger. Well, there’s no prize for the answer to that.

These bankers, this wealth of talent they hold in such regard and paid so much for, these market gurus who we trusted with our last pennies are clueless.

They were bred to think the corporate way, intuition, lateral thinking and ingenuity were systematically bred out of the culture. They can form no new strategies, cannot evolve and sit frozen in a time long gone. Like toothless old leopards, they can’t change their spots. They just sit there, idly feasting on an unending banquet of public money.

An innovation graveyard

Banks exist in a culture of cloistered protectionism and illusion. What’s done is done in secrecy within thinly shrouded cartels and comfortable, mutually convenient agreements. No one rocks the boat and no one pushes that boat into uncharted waters.

An unfair assessment, maybe. But can you point to one thing, anything at all you have seen borne out of this mess?

I’ll give you a minute to think about that one…

A frightening prospect for Bank of America

I have nothing against Ms Crawcheck, I may be misjudging her. But this is what I fear. I fear she’s been handed a poison chalice. She is meant to be seen as the new face of a staid and discredited banking system. As a woman, she’ll placate a Congress looking for banking’s new Messiah. And diversity is a buzz world in the PC world of American politics. And what if she fails?

Well they can just appoint a member of the old guard again. Out with the old, in with the old.