I am related by marriage to a major bank's headhunter. He's approaching 40. He's offering $200,000 a year jobs to those in their twenties and thirties who will be personal and corporate bankers of sorts.

Their very reason for existence is to talk people and companies into depositing and borrowing. They are sales people, not bankers, not financial wizards.

When I was a banker more than thirty years ago, that same guy making loans and soliciting business was lucky to make $18,000-$25,000 a year. And prior to the bank job, after college he had probably served at least three to five years as a Federal bank examiner.

So he knew how a bank worked, inside and out, and he had done enough credit auditing of loans gone bad to recognize their components.

And every bank back then had at least one credit officer. His job was to accumulate all of the financial information about the prospective borrower, then to apply the good-sense credit formulas he had learned in school. The credit officer had the final say as to whether it was prudent to make a loan or not.

If a bank had an overall delinquency of more than 3 or 4 percent when the examiners came, the bank was seriously repremanded for loose lending policies. Foreclosed property seriously hindered a bank. They not only had to write down the value of the asset, but they had to set aside an extra reserve for loss. That affected capital and profits.

Recently, I began thinking it would be fun and interesting to return to working for a bank. It seemed to me it would make great sense for any bank to want a senior citizen like me to represent its senior customer base. So I asked my headhunter relative by marriage about that idea.

"If we see any work experience that begins prior to the middle-seventies, we don't read any further. The bank won't consider anyone that old," he said. I suppose the federal law regarding employment discremination against older Americans is disregarded.

I responded, "So the fact that I have posted a bank's general ledger, run books of accounts with old-fashioned machines, made loans, audited car dealer floor plans, and have graduate degrees in banking and economics, have taught banking and finance on the college leval is not what any bank wants?"

"That's right," he said.

Well I have really been basking in the banking and mortgage messes these young financial wizards have manufactured with their own hands and wits. Every real banker -- those of us who actually learned and know banking --on this planet knew that they would crash and burn.

Now it will be interesting to see if it occurs to them to hire some of us old-timers back to straighten things out, or if they would prefer to loose billions of dollars more of depositors' and taxpayers' money.

Paradoxically , they are the ones worrying about what continuing the Social Security program will do to the country's economy.

"Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars!"
- Band Leader Les Brown

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