It didn’t, but it could have. The “book on banking” was that you establish relationships of trust, and you don’t make mistakes. Safra built his empire by creating strong bonds with immigrant communities, working hard at traditional businesses like gold trading, and providing strong customer service—and no ATM fees for anyone, by the way. He kept faith with his customers and was noted for intimately knowing the needs of small business. He was a brilliant showman, and I still remember his early gimmick in the '60s of giving out TV sets and appliances to people opening accounts at Republic. Nothing fancy. Just old-fashioned, conservative banking. You borrow money from depositors and pay less in interest than you receive in loans. But it’s their money, not yours.

Here’s something else Safra told me 15 years ago. This should be engraved in red ink on railroad ties and hung in every banker’s office in the nation: "My father taught me that if you loan a man too much money, you turn a good man into a bad man."

Shortly after Republic Bank was sold to HSBC, banks were unshackled from the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banks. The deed was done in November 1999. Three weeks later, Safra was dead.

President Obama is right to keep bankers out of proprietary trading and otherwise prevent banks from doing stupid things. But think about it: Why is that necessary? It’s because bankers are in a hurry to make money, because they are too eager to turn good people into bad people by loaning them too much money. It’s because they think that banking is a smart business, requiring supercomputers and not a human brain.

Perhaps, also it’s because they have no moral center, no code of ethics. Safra was a dedicated, sincere philanthropist and a man of deep religious convictions. Instead of a conscience, today’s bankers have a bonus, an incentive to make a profit, but not an incentive to do no harm.

It all comes down to a trait no banker is going to gain by attending business school, and it cannot be drummed into him or her by regulators or Obama. Nor does it require a family legacy in banking. Edmond Safra simply had common sense.