JPMorgan

Despite the financial crash of 2008 and the passage of the subsequent Dodd-Frank reform bill, not enough has been done thus far to address the issue of too big to fail banks. With assets equivalent to 64% of GDP concentrated amongst six of the largest Wall Street banks today, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has recently introduced the Safe, Accountable, Fair & Efficient Banking Act of 2012. The bill, which has wide-ranging support from the likes of former the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Republican ranking member on the Banking Committee Richard Shelby, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Richard Fisher, FDIC Board member Thomas Hoenig, Former Chairman of the FDIC Sheila Bair, economist Simon Johnson, Stanford  finance professor Anat Admati, and former governor of Utah Jon Huntsman, was introduced by Senator Brown prior to a hearing entitled “Is Simpler Better? Limiting Support for Financial Institutions.”  It seeks to impose strict limits on institutions' deposit and non-deposit liabilities and requires them to hold considerably more capital, reducing their leverage. In short, the bill seeks to break up big banks and prevent them from putting the nation’s economy at risk.

Reactions to departing Goldman derivatives salesman Greg Smith’s “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” which appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times last week, have ranged from the hyperbolic — Robert Reich’s “If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you’d have left is the pavement” — to the addicted — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “we need their taxes” (my paraphrase).

Both views are problematic, as I will address. But first, some historical context: