I have seen the future, and it is Rollerball.
I don't mean the carnage-crazy sport played by James Caan in the 1975 movie. I mean the film's depiction of life in 2018, when "corporate wars" have left the world controlled not by governments but by business monopolies -- Energy, Transport, Food, Communications, Housing and Luxury.
Bank of America Corp.'s multibillion-dollar takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. is the latest in a string of breathtaking acquisitions that has created a financial powerhouse so vast it seems well on its way to becoming a seventh heavyweight on the Rollerball global-domination list: Money.
Once the Merrill buyout is complete, BofA will rank as the country's largest retail bank, the largest credit card issuer, the largest mortgage provider and the largest retail brokerage. The bank has about 59 million consumer and small-business accounts, roughly $163 billion in credit card loans and more than 6,000 branches.
In the short run, that scope could be a boon to customers as smaller institutions follow Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. down the path to corporate road kill. If nothing else, BofA offers stability in a highly unstable world.
Longer term, does anyone think such a vast concentration of wealth and power in a single company is in the best interests of consumers?
"It can be very convenient having so much under one roof," said Jennifer Ellison, a principal at investment firm Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough in San Francisco, which was BofA's home until the bank and its name were taken over by NationsBank Corp. of North Carolina in 1998. "But if that roof ever collapses, where does that leave you?"
And are we getting to the point where BofA, like mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has become so big that the federal government couldn't let it fail, making taxpayers unwitting guarantors for the bank's global operations?
"We're already there," said Ruth Edwards, who was a BofA loan officer for 20 years and now works at Union Bank. "Employees have been saying that for years."
Edwards, 42, was one of more than a dozen BofA customers I chatted with the other day at Bank of America Plaza in downtown L.A.'s financial district, where I'd headed after the Merrill acquisition was announced.
Most people I met said BofA's growing heft is worrisome from a competitive-marketplace, taxpayer-getting-hosed standpoint. But as far as customers are concerned, things could be worse.
