The US has many banks on many different "tiers" -- if you consider a smaller community oriented bank its customers are most likely individuals that might have savings accounts, checking accounts, an old fashioned 30 YR fixed rate mortgage, and maybe CDs to get a little higher rate on money they won't need day-to-day. If you are a small business you might have some accounts there too, to write checks on and maybe even have a small loan. Simple stuff. The US also have a lot of large "money center" banks that are happy to do those sort of retail transactions, but they also have large investment banking/trading operations. There used to be laws against US banks having those operations as well as retail brokerage, but they complained to the regulators that the European and Asian banks had such combined operations and they got their wish. Doesn't really seem that made much difference...
The Dutch banks like ABN AMRO have tried to compete on both fronts in the US without much success -- Bank of America has purchased ABN's LaSalle Bank for their retail, mid-sized business banking, and "high net worth" clients that they've built from their Chicago base. ABN has been successful in doing the kind of global deal making that seem to need to go head to head with other large US or foreign based banks like RBS, that is why it cut sliced up between them and Fortis & Santander. It makes me feel a little bad, as LaSalle was a bank with a great heritage in Chicago and I have relatives that work there. I think that BofA probably overpaid, but their bid was based largely on the "pre-mortgage-securities-liquidity-crisis" and LaSalle actually had/has a fairly high quality portfolio of standard loans. BofA is probably better off with those loans, especially as BofA itself has LOTS of crappy overpriced California, Nevada and Florida homes on its books...
I disagree that the banks are/were "inventing profits". They are ALWAYS creating products that have the potential to be profitable, but they still had to find people with CASH that wanted better returns with what they assumed (were somewhat deluded into thinking...) had low-ish risk. The delusion was helped along by the firms that provided opinions/guarantees that these new-fangled instruments were kinda sorta like other plain old mortgage backed securities. Also those firm include the standard warnings like "past performance is not a guarantee of future returns/all opinions contained here-in are based on assumptions of conditions that we have knowledge of, we cannot attest to the truthfulness of those for whom we relied to provide data/all investing involves risk of loss of principal/ yadda yadda yadda ya...
If/when regulators from the various European governments intervene to prevent a bank take-over they are going to in effect relegate that bank to a lower tier -- in some cases this is a good thing. Right now if you look at a huge bank like Citigroup it is worth far more than a midsized bank like MB Financial -- market capitalization is order of magnitude larger, the Price/Earnings ratio is far greater, and yield are also higher. But the VOLATILITY of Citi (as expressed as "beta") is also far worse and the Earning Per Share are not as good. SO -- if you were to look at longer horizon you would expect to Citi to not perform as well as MB... (or maybe once Citi gets healthy it'll buy up MBFI and pay a premium -- I find it too easy for ME to create stories with happy endings for any 'investment' and tend, therefore to invest in only broad classes of financial assets...)
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AC
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MBFI
It is also interesting to consider that since there are so many more shares of C you'd have to spend a lot more money to have as much "voice" in proxy matters as you would at MBFI even though the C shares are, on pure dollar basis, cheaper.
I suspect the same things are true of the Dutch banks -- they are a different animal than the high flying banks.
BTW I do not think that SocGen lost $7B because of Jerome Kerviel -- he was simply the person that exposed how lax their internal controls were. Similarly BSC dropped in value by Billions because the entire market came to sense that the organization had based too much of its business on things that were merely a house of cards. Mr. Kerviel should have had more supervision. The overall market was on the verge of "supervising" BSC out of existence -- the Fed crafted a deal that prevented such a harsh fate from happening and possibly/probably sucking the entire economy into a very dark hole. Ideally rationality would have come earlier to "the Market" and to Mr. Kerviel's superiors but sometimes some good comes of these "cataclysmic events". Like a meteor blotting out the Sun and adding a whole lot of pressure to Darwinian succession, hopefully the people at SocGen will quickly evolve the controls needed to keep the French banking system in the game and those gullible investors that were wiped out by BSC's collapse will learn that extraordinary profits come with commensurate risks.
