Believe it or not I really do get tired of being right. At least when it means that the rest of world has been proven to have been in deep, deep denial of the obvious.

Of course Bank of America is looking to nuke 30,000 jobs. How else did you expect Ken Lewis to deliver the massive savings he promised Wall Street? Green Stamps?

And lookee here: “the majority of the layoffs are likely to come from Merrill’s side of the business.” Really? You mean Ken Lewis wrote a big fat $50b. check and intends to call the shots? Amazing.

Merrill’s single biggest expense is compensation. Even as ML hacks at that number feverishly, no way BofA preserves that overall structure. As a result the 16,000 ML brokers all the know-nothings assumed BofA wanted to acquire are being systematically thinned out by offering retention packages only to the “best producers.”

This is SOP for BofA. We told you it would happen back in September and again in October. Since then the Wachovia drama has assumed center stage, pushing aside the BofA story even though the total number of jobs at risk in the financial sector from the ML-BofA shotgun marriage was at least equal to those at risk from a complete Wachovia implosion.

And the latter is still not out of the question. But by all means let’s hear more speeches from the Mecklenburg County Commission about how to spend more public money.

Update: Lewis is telling the Uptown crowd at a Charlotte Chamber event that the bank is still working up exactly what jobs will be cut. That and that — surprise! — credit cards will not exactly be a growth area going forward.