If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: if it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And yet, we have a Washington Post story reporting that those banks and institutions labeled 'too big to fail' during the banking crisis, are now bigger than ever:

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

These are institutions screaming out for anti-trust actions. One of every ten dollars on deposit is at JP Morgan? How is this a public good?

More after the jump.

Michael Hirsch agrees:

This is still the central pathology of our economic era. We have a free-market system dominated by institutions so huge and "systemically important" that they don't have to play by free-market rules. Excessive risk-taking is built into the system because bailouts are; the promise of the latter begets the former.

This is the single largest failure of the Obama Administration thus far. And it is a failure. There were other options, better options. Breaking the banks up into smaller pieces, regionalizing them, would have been far better and helped, in the long run, to create a more robust banking system, one that isn't brittle and prone to outright collapse like it was in 2008. Mark my words: there will be another banking crisis. Why?

Well, that leads into the second massive failure of the Obama Administration: no regulatory structure to prevent banking crises was enacted in the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis. And with no structure in place, it is only a matter of time before the banks do what they are prone to do. Next time, however, with the banks being bigger than ever, the crisis will be worse.