WASHINGTON
--
Two years after President
Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the danger of financial institutions becoming
"too big to fail," the nation's largest banks are bigger than they
were before the credit crisis.
Five banks — JPMorgan
Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — held $8.5
trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy,
according to the Federal Reserve.
Five years earlier,
before the financial crisis, the largest banks' assets amounted to 43 percent
of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a
decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major
bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it
did during the 2008 crunch.
"Market participants
believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,"
said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
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