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Unconventional thoughts quickly become conventional wisdom when financial markets are in turmoil and people are looking for a way out.
Last Monday, this column explored the corrosive effects on the business model of both commercial banking and investment banking when they are combined into one operation. Conventional bank lending gets displaced by the urge to gamble on markets, and on the trading desks of investment banks the presence of a big-bank balance sheet allows for ever bigger and more dangerous bets.
Then, on Thursday, John Reed, the man who took Citigroup into its merger with Sandy Weill's Travelers Corporation 10 years ago to create the universal bank, went public with his view that it had been a "sad story".
"The specific merger transaction has to be seen to have been a mistake," he said. "The stockholders have not benefited. The employees certainly have not benefited and I don't think the customers have benefited." One wonders who did do well - other than the senior management who collected large bonuses for managing something that was bigger and the investment bankers and advisers who got vast fees for putting the deal together.
Pauline conversions appear to be the fashion. Last week, the former UBS chief executive Luqman Arnold, a man who, unlike the retired Reed, is still very much a player in the financial world through Olivant, his activist investment boutique-cum-private equity house, went public with his suggestion that UBS could no longer continue as a universal bank and that it should be broken up.
Obviously he is talking his book - his firm has built up a position in UBS shares - but it will take more than that to stifle the debate he has started. The only place you will find a black hole bigger than that of bank balance sheets is in the credibility of their management. A fundamental return to basics may well be the only way forward.
Not everyone agrees, though. Bob Diamond, architect of Barclays Capital, the investment banking division and profits powerhouse of Barclays, remains so convinced of the rightness of the model that he has temporarily moved back to New York because that is where the problems in the sector are the most acute and therefore where the opportunities and the rewards for the brave and well capitalised are so much greater. Or so he believes.
His message is that the public crippling of UBS and Citigroup does not mean all banks are in the same parlous state. It does mean that only a few - his being one - have the financial strength and the will to continue to go for it.
He may be right, but his message depends on an implicit bet that the massive leverage that underpins Barclays Capital will be sustainable. In fact, whether it is or not depends on how much more things will deteriorate and how long it all lasts.
It may or may not be a comfort to see that the other big believer is Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). It recently spelled out what a good deal it did in leading the consortium that bought Dutch bank ABN Amro at a heady price set before the credit crunch last year and how this was already boosting profits. This is an interesting claim, given that RBS is still not legally in control because the Dutch banking regulator has not finally approved the purchase, but its significance lies in the re-assertion of RBS's faith in the combined model. However, the bigger story would be if RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin had recanted, and there is no sign of that.
Therefore, we are left with four of the world's most experienced bankers in two camps with diametrically opposed views of the future structure of global banking. It is hardly surprising the market can't decide whether bank shares are a buy or a sell.
Gamble that's proved costly
Some three million people are regular users of betting shops, but last Saturday, the day of the Grand National, more than 10 million had a flutter, and the vast majority were losers. That, however, is one of the few bits of good news for a gambling industry that is rapidly reminding the old who had forgotten and the young who never learned that it is a highly cyclical industry.
Private-equity organisations have bought these businesses, loaded them up with debt and passed them from hand to hand at ever higher prices, like some newly discovered antique on its way to market in London. Not any more.
Gala Coral, the industry leader with 1566 betting shops, 165 bingo halls and 31 casinos, is now potentially so strapped for cash that its backers have injected new equity in return for more headroom on the debt. This falling star shows how stressed highly geared private-equity investments become as economic conditions change. It is not alone.
