Break Up the Wall Street Banks. Now

Chris Dodd and the other politicians working on financial reform claim that their proposed legislation will end the long-standing U.S. policy which posits that the biggest financial institutions are "too big to fail" and therefore must be bailed out every time they find themselves in financial distress. At the core of the "Dodd bill" is the premise that regulators need yet more discretion, more power, and more regulatory tools if they are to succeed at last in exorcizing long-entrenched too big to fail strategies from the heart of our regulatory canon. The Dodd bill is fundamentally flawed because it fails to address the basic fact that the "too big to fail" is a political problem, not an economic problem. The only way to eliminate too big to fail as the regulatory solution of choice is to break up any financial institution that is or becomes too big to fail. Unfortunately, the Dodd bill does not break up existing banks.

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