This is NOT about banks having too many assets, with those assets allowing them to wield wealth and power.
It's about banks not having enough assets, not having liquidity and becoming insolvent. Banks don't fail because they have too much money. They fail because they don't have the assets to cover heavily leveraged investments, like the derivatives they were offering.
That is what happened when the big financial institutions went under - they weren't solvent. The Feds bailed them out by LOANING them $ to cover their losses, and the banks paid back those loans with interest.
Now, if Sanders is saying that banks should only be allowed to hold so much in assets, that's a different question entirely. Then, you need to say what that number is: $50-billion? $500-billion? A trillion? What is it? He has never addressed that issue, because he is conflating banks going under (because they lack assets) with banks thriving (because they have plenty of assets).
And if the only reason he can offer for breaking up a healthy financial institution is because he fears it will wield too much political or economic power, then that's a pretty poor reason. Lots of entities wield political power. Reigning in their political power is a matter of repealing Citizens United and passing additional laws that limit their ability to fund political initiatives. Such laws would cover ALL banks/financial institutions, rather than just targeting the largest by "breaking them up."
BTW - Dodd/Frank provides that if a bank is about to fail, the Feds take it over, pay creditors what they can and put the bank out of business. Notice that the Feds don't wait for the bank to actually fail. They step in before then to mitigate further losses and bad decisions being made by the people who brought the bank to the brink of insolvency.
Sanders - clueless on what are supposed to be his core issues.
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