Heavy Flow (not an iPad post)

Was 2009 a great year to be a bank? The headlines all say so. (The 140 U.S. banks that were closed by the FDIC last year may disagree some.) But, as Isabelle Kaminska of Alphaville notes, very little of the gains posted for last year came from anything related to talent:

Deutsche Bank reported net income of €5bn for the year 2009 on Thursday, compared to a €3.9bn loss in 2008.

This, we would say, is a pretty impressive turnaround in anyone’s business….

Deutsche attributes much of that growth to the successful re-orientation of its business towards customer business and liquid, ‘flow’ products. While it’s not broken out within the results, we’re willing to bet that a large slice of that re-orientation was therefore focused on managing flow emanating from the group’s ever growing synthetic exchange-traded-product and foreign exchange businesses — both of which happen to do very well when spreads are wide, and volatility is high.

When I first started working in the investment side of the banking industry, 20-some years ago, the traders and marketers were especially careful to distinguish themselves from the “retail” side of banking. Indeed, the retail bankers were described as “9-6-3” people: lend at 9%, take deposits at 6%, and be on the golf course by 3:00.

Now that that same type of effort is producing all those record profits, is it time to decide that the legendary “management skills” of Jimmy Cayne, Vikram Pandit, and Neutron Jack (who turned GE from a products company into a finance company) might not have been all that different from that of a polyester-suited small-town bank manager?