Barofsky: Biggest Banks Evah!

Neil Barofsky, former Inspector General of TARP, is out with his new book Bailout this month.  It purports to tell the true story about how the deal went down and what’s gone wrong from the inside.  And I purport to have begun reading it this weekend (seriously folks, I’m 20 pages in and it’s great, comes out on 7/24, pre-order it here).

In the meanwhile, Barofsky’s got an excerpt up from the afterword of his book over at Bloomberg View, and from it, I’ve plucked this incredible statistics-laden paragraph…

It is clear that the criminal-justice system has proved ill-equipped to address the financial crisis. For that, we needed effective regulatory reform. Instead, we got the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

My fear about the inadequacy of Dodd-Frank has only gotten worse over the past year. The top banks are 23 percent larger than they were before the crisis. They now hold more than $8.5 trillion in assets, the equivalent of 56 percent of gross domestic product, up from 43 percent just five years ago. The risk in our banking system is remarkably concentrated in these banks, which now control 52 percent of all industry assets, up from 17 percent four decades ago. There is broad recognition that Dodd-Frank hasn’t solved the problem it was meant to address — the power and influence of banks deemed too big to fail.

This is no longer big banks, these are the Biggest Banks Evah!

Nicely done.

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