Simon Johnson says: "Break up the banks"

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Simon Johnson is the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and in recent months has emerged as one of the most cogent critics of how the Obama administration is addressing the banking crisis. On Tuesday, Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, testified before Congress' Joint Economic Committee on the topic of the day: "Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Save? Examining the Systemic Threats of Large Financial Institutions."

In your own testimony, your basic message was pretty simple: It's time to break up the banks.

Yeah. I've been saying that for awhile, but the new piece is to use antitrust law to do it. Some good lawyers have thought about this now for us, and they are saying, certainly, changing the legislation to make this easier is the way to go. The lawyers themselves are divided on whether you can do this under the existing legal framework. But the historians are adamant that what we are saying is very much in the spirit of the original antitrust movement. What Teddy Roosevelt and his cohorts were worried about was excessive power -- political power for these oligarchs.

― Andrew Leonard

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/feature/200...ch/htww/feature