What Next

Now that we've committed hundreds of billions of Dollars to keeping the financial system afloat, when do we start breaking up the massive megafinance firms? Not as a punishment, by any means, but as long as they are perceived as "too big to fail," it creates the risk that we're going end up right back where we started. It doesn't make sense to have so much wealth and power concentrated in one place, when ill-considered decisions (or simply risky plays that don't pay off) can sink the entire economy. Right now there are a small set of companies that need us (the public) much less than we need them, and when they get into trouble, we have to rush to the rescue, but they're able to insulate themselves from things that can sink hundreds of thousands of Americans. Any imbalance in accountability like this is a recipe for trouble.