Simon Johnson: Breaking Up Biggest Banks Regains Support

In particular, informed sentiment has shifted against continuing to allow very large banks to operate in their current highly leveraged form, with a great deal of debt and very little equity. There is increasing recognition of the huge and unfair costs that these structures impose on the rest of the economy.

The implicit subsidies provided to too-big-to-fail companies allow them to increase compensation by hundreds of millions of dollars. But the costs imposed on the rest of us are in the trillions of dollars. This is a monstrously unfair and inefficient system, and sensible public figures are increasingly pointing this out.