Hooray for Boring Banks

Mere months after the financial system almost collapsed, banks are making money again. One after the other, they've reported big profits for the first quarter: $4.2 billion at Bank of America, $3 billion at Wells Fargo, $2.4 billion at JPMorgan Chase, $1.8 billion at Goldman Sachs, even $1.6 billion at Citigroup — which lost $18.7 billion in 2008.

Some of these windfalls were the chimerical sums of weird accounting conventions. Citi, for example, booked $2.5 billion in gains — without which it would have booked a quarterly loss — because investor fears that it would go under decreased the market value...