Merger of Two Big Banks

It does not take an accountant to see the hole in the logic to the claim that the merger of BankAmerica and Security Pacific will result in an improvement in “efficiency,” which will result in a “savings” of $2 billion (front page, Aug. 13). Only a business with monopolistic goals would view competition as a wasteful redundancy and elimination of competition as an improvement in efficiency. This would imply that efficient use of industry resoures as a whole is synonymous with individual company efficiency. Just think, if we only had one bank, how much more efficient the industry could be!

The end result is that the “full service” bank will now have fewer but more expensive services, longer lines and less convenient branches, and our neighborhoods will have more empty buildings with unemployed sitting out front!

DAVID MELVOLD, Irvine