On the recordSeptember 18, 2013
as you know, today marks the fifth anniversary of the 2008 financial panic which threw our country into a severe recession and the worst economic crisis this country has had since the 1930s. It has been 5 years since Lehman Brothers collapsed. It has been 5 years since the Federal Government seized full control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It has been 5 years since Washington bailed out AIG, the giant insurance company. In the weeks and months following the events of September 2008, Members of both parties agreed that one of the most important things we could do is to fix the idea of too big to fail when it came to some of the largest financial institutions in America. Too big to fail--so the only alternative was for taxpayers to bail them out. We wanted to end it. Five years later, I wish I could say we had succeeded. I wish I could say that too big to fail was a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the very law that was passed by our Democratic friends, primarily, that was supposed to end too big to fail actually codified it, actually made it more certain to occur because it gave Federal regulators the power to identify something called systemically important institutions. Doesn't that sound suspiciously like too big to fail if you are systemically important financial institutions?…
