The Barack Obama administration and the US Congress are now trying to address the fundamental issue of TBTF, generally acknowledged as a key contributing factor to the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Yet, government bailout programs for big financial institutions have resulted in banks becoming even bigger than before the crisis. Apparently, the administration’s solution to "too big to fail" is to make banks bigger. JP Morgan Chase is reportedly holding more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in the US. The four biggest super banks (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank) now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards in the US. Since the financial crisis, these four super banks are each allowed to hold more than 10% of the nation's deposits, having been exempted from a longstanding rule barring such market dominance. In several metropolitan regions, these new super banks are now permitted to take market share beyond what the Department of Justice's anti-trust guidelines previously allowed. The American banking system is now one of a handful of large global trading companies pretending to be banks, taking huge profits from high-risk proprietary trades with government-backed money, instead of one of a network of small conservative local institutions serving their domicile communities merely as intermediaries of money through local deposits for nominal fees.

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system. The "too-big-to-fail" banks will be left in place, even bigger and less accountable than before. There will be nothing done to separate commercial and investment banking, so giants like Goldman Sachs will be free to speculate with money guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The main difference is that the Federal Reserve Board will be granted even more power than it has now. And, we will tell the Fed to be smarter in the future, so that it doesn't make the same stupid mistakes that gave us the current crisis.