Seafirst does not exist. The Washington-based bank was bought six years ago by Bank of America. All the bank's services have been consolidated into a regional office that approves mortgages and business loans, and Seafirst exists only as a marketing name. Perhaps because of its homespun moniker, the bank has a strong hold on the state it falsely calls home--nearly one out of every four dollars deposited by our businesses and households goes into its coffers. And despite the name on the bank card, deposited dollars know no state boundaries. With an avarice for new markets across the country and investments abroad, BankAmerica uses Washington dollars to gain a global reach.

The corporate consolidation sweeping through the financial industry (that group of companies that uses your money when you're not, or lends you money at usurious rates when you need more) has lately hit Bank of America, which is merging with East Coast-based NationsBank and Washington Mutual, which bought California-based Home Savings to become the country's largest thrift. Because of recent deregulation, the consolidating frenzy has crossed boundaries to fold Travelers Group into Citicorp and combine insurance underwriting with banking--a prohibition in US banking laws since the 1930s.

That's how bank merger-mania works in the late 1990s: the mid-sized state banks combine in order to marry larger regional banks, even as the regional banks are swallowed by multi-faceted holding companies like Citigroup or BankAmerica. So long as the stock continues to rise, Wall Street loves the trend. It showered accolades on the Citicorp/Travelers merger, and hiked the stock value of most national banks on the same day.

While stockholders and CEOs reap enormous profits, bankers and financial reporters in the daily newspapers continue to complain about burdensome, archaic laws that separate banking and commerce (brokerage houses, insurance companies, etc.). Indeed, few industries remain so regulated (nominally with the public's interest in mind). Since the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act has prevented insurance companies and banks from combining, for fear that they will self-insure their own risky loans (the proposed Citigroup merger assumes that Congress will pass a law erasing that barrier).

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation bails out banks when they make inept and/or corrupt investments, like a whole host of savings and loans did in the 1980s, following vast deregulation of the savings and loan industry. The American taxpayer goes to the mat each time banks foul up. In exchange, the twenty-year-old Community Reinvestment Act mandates that a bank must extend loans and services to its entire market, not just white middle-class clientele. In practice, it doesn't work that way.

Should either the Citigroup or the BankAmerica goliath fail, the entire FDIC fund would not be enough to bail it out. And banks still do a poor job of avoiding "red-lining" (discriminatory lending practices). If you live in the city, you're still less likely to be able to get a mortgage than if you buy a house in a suburban neighborhood. Minority entrepreneurs often resort to lines of credit because they can't obtain small-business loans as easily as white business owners. And ATMs are still hard to find in poor neighborhoods. Yet federal regulators judge 99 percent of all banks to be performing satisfactorily in their community reinvestment activity. Public interest indeed.

So far, the only interests the current wave of consolidation have served are those of stockholders and executives. When banks were small and restricted to an intrastate service area, they made their profits from the interest rate spread: the two- or three-percent difference between the interest they paid out to holders of savings accounts, and the interest they took in on loans. But as interest rates have dropped, banks are more dependent on fees for ATM use, overdraft charges, or stop payment fees; they have also cut down on labor costs by consolidating small local services, like loan processing, into regional or national operations. Mergers build revenue so that margins can be fattened and stockholders pacified. But if banks fail, the taxpayers, not the stockholders, are the ones to pay.

If the public must pay when banks fail, it should at least benefit with improvements in services. People should be able to get low-interest home mortgages that don't require a down payment and expensive mortgage insurance. More minority- and women-owned small businesses should have access to capital through small business loans, not through credit cards with double-digit interest rates. The working poor should be able to deposit their wages into checking accounts free of exorbitant overdraft charges and other fees. Credit unions have been one avenue of escape for beleaguered bank customers; however, mega-banks have recently put pressure on Congress and the courts to limit credit union membership.

When economists talk about the efficiencies created by mega-mergers, they're referring to the reduced costs to the corporation or holding company that owns banking, financial, insurance and brokerage services. They're speaking of standardized, one-size-fits-all loan programs for homebuyers and small businesses that are profitable for the bank, but burdensome for the payee. As banks combine, you will be deluged with propaganda about one-stop financial shopping in your neighborhood branch. But no bank executive is going to design a lending program tailored to local needs. Your bank may still be on the street corner, but its heart is on Wall Street.