Size Matters

The administration that promised change we can believe in and the highest level of transparency in history now delivers “too big to fail” banks - bigger, more complicated and secret than ever.

First, the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress continued policies that assured a number of large financial institutions that taxpayers had bailed out after the financial collapse got even larger and more powerful.

Now the administration and congressional leadership have proposed a scheme that leaves the big banks in place, with a regulatory scheme that provides more questions than answers, with secrecy that treats the banking system like a CIA covert operation.

Never-Ending Bailout is Not a Partisan Issue

It would be hard to find two congressmen more politically opposite than Brad Sherman and Jeb Hensarling.

Sherman is solid Democrat from the San Fernando Valley in southern California. Hensarling is a red-meat Texas conservative protege of former senator Phil Gramm.

Sherman and Hensarling may not agree about anything else.

But the two men have been outspoken in one shared view: that the bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP has lacked accountability or transparency from day one.