SMALLER BANKS ARE DOING FINE. I remember talking to someone who’d been on the board of a small S&L during the S&L crisis, and he remarked that luckily, “we were dumb enough to think that borrowing at 5% to lend at 10% was a good enough business to be in,” so that they’d missed all the high-flying deals that brought down bigger operations. Maybe there’s a larger lesson there?