nnReading between the lines, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis is telegraphing that assumptions about BofA maintaining Merrill Lynch’s structure — ie, employees — may be wildly off the mark. This is simply not the way BofA operates.

Maybe I’m a little paranoid having seen this move before back when NationsBank bought my then-bank Sovran. The same stuff was said about “preserving” Sovran’s “value-add” relationships with customers. Didn’t happen. Within months corporate policies were changed and Sovran employees and execs eased out. There is simply no other way to achieve the aggressive cost savings that are promised to Wall Street by such mergers — and Lewis is not backing down from the staggering $7b. in annual savings BofA has guided analysts to accept as flowing from the ML merger.

You cannot hit that number by essentially retraining a large chunk of your workforce in the ways of BofA and then deciding which ones to keep. No, I still believe Lewis and crew will identify key players in the ML operation to bring on board — and beam the rest into deep space.