Instant Karma’s gonna get you.

When they’re not jacking up people’s interest rates or introducing new credit card fees, the good people at Bank of America must now be looking for ways to charge customers for breathing the air in their banking centers. Anything to make up for the billion-dollar loss they just posted in the third quarter of this year. After taking into account dividends owed to preferred shareholders, the true loss was closer to $2.24 billion.

Bank of America attributed the losses to bad loans resulting from the economic crisis. They did not account for good, profitable customers leaving due to their all-around douchebaggery. (Editor’s Note: It’s a word.  Look it up.)

Not to take pot-shots at my former employer, but the nation’s largest bank has clearly lost its way, and now it’s ability to turn a profit. This is in comparison to outfits like JPMorgan, whose profits lifted the Dow Industrials Average to over 10,000 points this week. This is the same JPMorgan that decided to step back from their outrageous overdraft fees and not act like Somali pirates when catching their customers adrift in these financial waters.

These losses came despite the fact that Bank of America was handed its ownership of Merrill Lynch in a sweetheart deal from the government, and Merrill doubled its revenue and profit from a year ago. Bank of America is also able to borrow liberally from the Feds almost for free.

At least with B of A there is some head-rolling as their CEO Ken Lewis Lewis has decided to “retire” at the end of the year and has also agreed to give up his salary and other compensation for 2009. That part was not altogether his idea, since Kenneth Feinberg, the U.S. Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, publicly suggested that he should.

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