We don’t often agree with self-professed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The largest banks — the ones that were “too big to fail” five years ago — are bigger than they were when President Obama was elected nearly five years ago. Much bigger.
According to Stephen Gandel of Fortune,
The six largest banks in the nation now have 67% of all the assets in the U.S. financial system, according to bank research firm SNL Financial. That amounts to $9.6 trillion, up 37% from five years ago.
Here at Twitchy, we like capitalism. We love it, in fact. But that certainly doesn’t mean we think taxpayers should foot the bill every time a “too big to fail” bank makes poor investments.
As James Pethokoukis noted in the Weekly Standard last year,
Banks that big and complex and interconnected are both the unsurprising outcome of Washington’s 30-year expansion of the federal safety net and the cause of its ongoing existence. When you combine a “too big to fail” guarantee from Uncle Sam with the natural human tendency toward irrational exuberance, you have the key elements in place for another unaffordable financial crisis.
The fact is that a “too big to fail” guarantee is not capitalism. It’s crony capitalism. We wish more elected officials would speak out against it.
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