I agree we have been made to subsidize, by way of the bail-out, Wall Street's irresponsible behavior.  And we have become enablers of their bad behaviors  - Hedge Funds should be done away with.  Goldman Sachs has continued their insane profit making schemes unabated by the near collapse and nothing is being done to them....talk about Too Big AND Powerful to touch....thanks to their lobbyists! Paulson being one of THEM.  He was like a weasel in the hen house and we all paid the price for it.  We can only hope that investment banks and financial banks will be TRULY separated and that there won't be any "strings" attached, if this legislation is repealed in it's entirety.

Preventing any entities from being too big to fail becomes more complicated when you think of countries. Is the US too big to fail, i.e., if the US went bankrupt would the rest of the world be able to recover well enough and continue making progress? We may see about the EU...

Or is it financial institutions in particular whose interrelation, complexity, and nonsensically large notional values create explosive risk?

It would be interesting to list the entities we consider too big to fail and see how they contribute to overall failure risk. Is it possible to keep them all from being too big to fail? If not, should we try to consolidate this risk in one entity and hope that limited vulnerability never becomes a problem, or should we spread this risk out and scrambling to fix the messes when they occur?

It's closer to a "Postpone Meltdown" button. After they extract the taxpayer's money to pay for Wall St's gambling; and we're out of bullets and money because of their greed; the collapse will occur anyway and the transfer of wealth will be complete. It will just be harder and longer because of the bailouts. Backstopping depository banks (as before the repeal of glass steagall) is important ................ but NOT the casino banks!

Moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of one party may change to the detriment of another after a transaction has taken place. And what will keep them from returning in the future with their hand out?

Without addressing the structural problems that got us here in the first place; just handing the banks our money, will lead us to the poor farm ........ no matter how many buttons you have.

Our discussion/poll at DailyKos. All positive so far.

We already have something like that. It's called a monopoly. If a company shows risk of becoming so large that it monopolizes something, that company is forced to break into smaller bits.