http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/financial_crisis_inquiry_commission/index.html
The 1930's Pecora Commission suggested breaking investment banks apart from commercial banks. Today's Financial Inquiry Commission apparently dwells on the minutiae of the current crisis without any big picture conclusion other than punishing those that acted badly. It's no secret that banks being regulated co-opted the regulators, Federal Reserve and Congress so any law that proposes more regulation is destined to fail again.
13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak makes a very good case for breaking apart our biggest financial institutions into more manageable not "too big to fail" entities. NTBTF would do more than any overseer of bank finance could do to keep bubbles from getting out of hand. The present set of bank regulators that are a part of the FDIC can and should continue, but no bank with FDIC insured deposits should be one tenth as big as the new maximum permissible and greatly reduced financial behemoths proposed here. So if Bank of America got rid of Merrill Lynch as a way to reduce its size it would still have to contend with dismantling it's national network into separate entities if there was to be FDIC insurance on deposits. This may leave those on Wall Street as agog as was AT&T before it was broken up. Breaking the phone company monopoly seemed irresponsible and inconvenient at the time but there is much agreement today that it was the right thing to do.
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