With so many piecemeal changes happening in banking, how come we don't rationalize the situation?

Because I come from a funny industry. We all stand up and say, "Thank God we don't have national banking!" Then I go down to the corner of Broad and Wall streets in New York City, and I see a big building there that says "Bank of America." There's one like it in California that says "Citicorp." There are five coast-to-coast electronic funds transfer systems up and running. So, what's all this nonsense about when are we going to get national banking? We've got it.

VISA is a national bank and it's running flat out. They made a great breakthrough recently. They got J.C. Penney to take VISA in their seventeen hundred stores, and that's the ball game.

Sears is trying to sell its twenty-six million credit-card holders commercial paper[31]  at 10 percent for six months through their credit cards. People who can't spell [32]  are going to find out what it is.

The whole competitive structure is so ridiculous, that every banker who goes to a Rotary Club to talk about free enterprise, ends up adding in parenthesis (except for me).

People think of a bank as a building with a name carved over the door. But a bank today is a plastic card. The delivery system for banking is a plastic card. With our Citicard in New York, right now you can do most of your banking twenty-four hours a day. We've got fifty million transactions a year going out there. The idea that a bank is a building is obsolete.

The technology's way ahead of the regulators, as usual.

[31] Promissory notes issued by companies in lieu of bank loans. Because commercial paper is not secured by tangible collateral only large, well established companies can sell them.

[32] The flow of savings out of banks and savings institutions which have interest ceilings fixed by law into commercial paper and other investment instruments offering higher interest rates.