Portside

The Vermont Senator just stood up to Amazon — but what about those Too Big To Fail banks?

Paul Krugman is not a Political Scientist. Krugman's "brand" is that he is a "brilliant, Nobel Prize winning economist." In fact, much of his early research was brilliant; and, to be sure, Krugman did win the Nobel Prize. BUT, the misleading discussion of economics contained in his piece, "Sanders Over the Edge" does raise this question in my mind: Is Paul Krugman still qualified to write an economics opinion column for the New York Times?

The Federal Reserve's newest bank president, a Republican who served as a top Treasury Department official during the financial crisis, called for policy makers to consider breaking up big banks to prevent future government bailouts. His proposals also include: Turning large banks into public utilities; and taxing leverage throughout the financial system. Seven years after the crisis, it is now time to move forward and end TBTF.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. A series of related corruption stories spilling out of the financial sector, suggests the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.