Bank deposit mania.

ARKANSASBUSINESS.COM PUT out a "breaking news e-newsletter on the Friday afternoon in October that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued its annual "summary of deposits." Last week, Arkansas Business devoted pages and pages to the minute changes in deposit market share of banks statewide and in selected counties. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did a similar postmortem in its Sunday business section that even ranked the individual bank branches that claim the most deposits.

All the while, bankers are saying that deposits--expense items for banks--aren't nearly as important as the loan assets that generate revenue. So why all the fuss?

Simply put: The summary of deposits, which is nothing more and nothing less than a snapshot of bank deposits nationwide on June 30 of each year, is the only report that indicates just how well multi-state banks are performing in Arkansas. I think I can safely speak for our friendly competitors at the D-G when I say business reporters would much rather track assets and returns on assets in Arkansas than deposit market share. We just don't get that chance.

The FDIC is in the business of insuring deposits, so it collects untold gigabytes of data on deposits. The FDIC does occasionally express concern about the quality of a bank's assets, but only because it wants to prevent a collapse that might create claims against the deposit insurance.

Still, deposit trends are far from meaningless. For small and new banks, deposits are necessary for a healthy lending business. For larger and well-established banks, deposits can be an indicator of retail customer satisfaction. Regions Bank might want to downplay the fact that its market share has declined by more than a third since it acquired First Commercial Corp. in 1998. It may be true that some portion of that has been captured in uninsured investment products and that some is "hot money" that chases the highest CD rates from bank to bank. But it is also true that Regions simply isn't the dominant banking operation in Arkansas that First Commercial was.

Similarly, the fact that Arvest Bank's statewide deposits were a mere $100 million less than Regions' on June 30 is a fair indicator of where some of that banking clout has gone. In a statewide deposit market of $44 billion, Regions and Arvest are in a statistical dead heat. Which one is making more loans in Arkansas would be the tiebreaker, but that's information no newspaper is privy to.

An acquaintance said he was "ready to get excited" about Barack Obama, the freshman U.S. senator from Illinois who made a recent swing through Little Rock to sell his latest book and stump for fellow Democrats.

That's dangerous talk. Once one gets excited about a politician, there's nothing to look forward to except disappointment.

The current political season will end tomorrow, for which we can all be grateful. As of this writing--which is to say there's still time for this next statement to be outdated--the stupidest development was the manufactured uproar over a botched punch line in a Bush-bashing joke by former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. It was a lame attempt to begin with--Kerry was trying to impugn the president's education, which is actually one of the brighter spots of his personal resume. Still, only someone with a vested interest in misunderstanding could believe that Kerry was trying to insult the intelligence of U.S. military personnel.

The Republican reaction reminded me of the old ploy we used to use on the kids: "Look! A distraction!" Children stop being fooled by that sort of thing pretty quickly. Unfortunately, the American electorate has been slow to learn that anyone whose political strategy depends on misleading the voters is an enemy of democracy.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at [e-mail].