TBTF?-3

"Nearly a century ago, the jurist Louis Brandeis railed against what he called the 'curse of bigness.' He warned that banks, railroads and steel companies had grown so huge that they were lording it over the nation's economic and political life. ... Today, amid the wreckage of the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, bigness of one of our biggest problems. ... In its overhaul of financial regulation last week, the Obama administration proposed several measures to try to contain the biggest of America's big banks. But it stopped far short of calling for the dismantling of those institutions. ... But if a company is too big to fail, should it be considered too big to exist? Brandeis worried that the corporate giants of his day would imperil democracy through concentrated economic power. His essays, collected in book form and published in 1914 under the title, 'Other People's Money--and How the Bankers Use it,' helped drum up support for the creation of the [Fed], antitrust laws and trust busting. ... Lawrence H. Summers, the White House economic adviser, says there is no going back to the days of small banks", my emphasis, Eric Dash at the NYT, 21 June 2009, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21dash.html.

"'We need to get rid of too big to fail,' says Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 'It perpetuates a system where bankers make profits and the public takes losses. We want to put responsibility back on bankers.' ... Speaking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Meltzer says ... 'We should take Fannie asnd Freddie and close them down'," Carolyn Baum at Bloomberg, 23 June 2009, link: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a05rHorIdIzg.

Why not Larry? Whose pocket are you in anyway? Decades ago our Republic existed with smaller banks. Why can't we today? Other People's Money originally appeared as a series of articles in Harper's in 1913. The problems Brandeis wrote of still plague us today. Yes, ED such institutions should be busted up. Now.

Yes Meltzer. I guess Meltzer is not on Citigroup's short list for consulting projects.