Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

... despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it's also far too corrupt to survive...

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The rationale for allowing that merger spree in the first place was based on a phony assumption: that big banks would somehow be more efficient and more profitable than small ones. "The whole premise of a Citibank or a Chase or a Bank of America is wrongheaded," says Susan Webber, an analyst who writes one of the most popular and respected financial blogs under the pseudo­nym Yves Smith. "Studies consistently show that after a certain size threshold, bank efficiency taps out. In fact, it turns out that all those cost savings the banks were supposed to enjoy from being bigger were actually based on cutting corners and fraud."