Bank of America's Lewis Stays Positive

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Anyone listening to Ken Lewis' keynote speech at the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch financial services conference on Tuesday morning couldn't be faulted for believing that his replacement will have a hard time mucking things up.

Bank of America (BAC Quote) is the country's biggest bank with the broadest reach, offering a cornucopia of financial services just a stone's throw away from 80% of U.S. households. According to Lewis, it's also the best bank, with leading positions in "all the most important sectors" from home lending to deposits to credit cards and brokerage services.

"The advantage of scale, diversity of income and national reach are key to our success," the departing CEO said at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown Manhattan. "These advantages allow us to create efficiencies smaller competitors cannot duplicate. We have a national brand; we have lower unit costs; and as one thinks about what happened in the most recent crisis, it was the universal banks that not only survived but help[ed] absorb those that could not."

The CEO predicts the biggest near-term challenge will be keeping credit costs in check, but he also believes that those costs have started to peak. He also said that consumer-protection laws to limit bank fees and sudden interest rate hikes pose a serious threat to fee income. But Lewis sees silver linings in all the clouds of economic data -- from stabilizing home prices to higher production levels to slowing job losses -- and chose to focus on those instead.