Financial Reform Law Institutionalizes ‘Too Big To Fail’

We talked about the stupidity of the financial reform bill before they passed that 2,000 page monstrosity that includes the Office of Financial Research to track every single financial transaction in the country, but now the rest of the country might just find out how bad the Dodd-Frank law actually is.

Bloomberg has put out a report (see video link below) showing that the ‘too big to fail’ banks actually grew into mega-banks during the financial crisis through the gobbling up of rivals.

This is not big news but these facts might be:

• The US banking sector has grown 7 times faster than GDP.
• The top ten banks hold 77% of the country’s assets.
• The five biggest banks hold 58% of the financial system’s assets.
• Any bank with more than $50 Billion is ‘statistically significant’ (too big to fail) and there are now 35 of these too big banks.
• Banks are larger than pre-crisis levels.
• The number of ‘too big to fail banks’ could grow by 40% over the next 15 years.

March 18 (Bloomberg) — The largest U.S. banks have grown larger since the financial crisis, and the number of “too-big-to-fail” banks will increase by 40 percent over the next 15 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Dodd-Frank law would prohibit the largest banks from merging with one another. The law would not prevent the largest banks from growing in other ways, according to the Bloomberg Government Study, “Too-Big-to-Fail Banks Get Bigger After Dodd-Frank.” Bloomberg’s Lizzie O’Leary reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

You can watch the entire Bloomberg video here, and are you still financially involved with one of these megabanks?