Push to End Too-Big-To-Fail Goes Mainstream

Push to End Too-Big-To-Fail Goes Mainstream

A Matt Taibbi piece. He's fantastic, one of the few journalists that really understands just how impossibly corrupt and damaged our financial system is. He's talking, here, about the recent report from the Dallas Fed, saying that Too Big To Fail is extremely, extremely toxic.

An actual Fed bank saying that -- it's about damn time.

My prediction: sudden personnel changes at the Dallas Fed, nothing else changes at all.

As long as there are no international controls on the flow of capital, there remains a widespread and powerful tax haven legal apparatus and there are endemic corporate secrecy laws then any push to reform banking or corporate finance is doomed to failure.

Too-Big-To-Fail should be understood to be a synonym for for too-big-to-exist. Yet international finance & corporate governance lacks even the barest modicum of transparency that would allow us to even approach an understanding of which entities are or are not actually "Too-Big-To-Fail". And that is to say nothing of the massive pressure that off-shore capital places on government NOT to reform anything.

Agree that Taibbi is an excellent journalist; both he and the planet money folk are really great.

I don't know how anyone (except those it protects) could think "Too-Big-To-Fail" is a good thing. It implies an immunity to the sorts of consequences that make the system work.