Liberals Only: Rate President Obama's Job Performance

[Benton D Struckcheon]

21. To reply explicitly to the premise of this thread,

the big banks are groaning under a massive full-court press of regulators who are on them all the time now to report, among other things, their immediate liquidity, that is, how much money they have available to answer depositors' immediate claims. For a huge global bank, this is a lot harder than it sounds.
Up until now they've been able to fudge the numbers by reducing their loan loss reserves, which gooses their profits. But that's artificial. They have large added costs due to already stricter capital requirements, they have to justify, via annual stress tests, how much they pay in dividends to their shareholders, they have to produce a living will that details how they can be wound up if they fail; the list of things they now have to track in order to satisfy the regulators is very long. Sooner or later those added costs will weigh, and that alone may force them to break up just to get rid of the added costs unique to being a megabank.

Obama didn't do anything as elegant as FDR's fix, which was Glass-Steagall, but what he's done doesn't qualify as a gift to the banks either.