I won’t tell you who I was meeting with but I was on a tour of big banks and met with three of them on a big deal.

All anyone wanted to do was discuss the new stimulus package; the new legislation; and the law of unintended consequence.

So the new regulations around dollars into banks in the legislative package have made all banks and bankers want to buy their way out of the stimulus package.

But only a few will be able to pull it off. The ones that buy their way out won’t be regulated. They will be able to recruit and hire the best and the brightest from the banks that can’t buy out their government investments. They can pay salaries and bonuses and recruit great execs.

The banks left with government dollars will suffer a brain drain and a client exodus. Those banks will be in deeper trouble. The government will have to pay up even more dollars to save those troubled banks.

Private boutique banks will prosper.  A few big banks will scale. Many banks with government dollars will crater and international banks will prosper and become more important to us here in the US.

Stimulus dollars may be like taking heroin, it feels really good until it kills you.