Dodd-Frank Won't Stop 'Too Big To Fail' Banks, Public Poll Says

As policymakers continue to spar over how much the nation's big banks should be reined in, many people have lost faith in the idea that it will ever happen, a new poll suggests.
More than half -- 57 percent, to be exact -- of those recently polled by American Banker said Dodd-Frank financial regulatory act has not given regulators the "power" to let too-big-to-fail banks, well, fail. The poll implies that the publics believe banks are here to stay precisely because new rules put into place since the financial crisis are not tough enough to allow major banks to collapse without risking macroeconomic catastrophe.
This informal poll also somehwt reflects what some top policymakers have said -- mainly that many banks remain so gargantuan and so entrenched that the country has an interest in protecting them, for better or worse.
Take, for example, a March report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that argued many banks are not only still operating at a too-big-to-fail level but eroding public confidence in capitalism as it's practiced in America.
"[V]irtually nobody has been punished or held accountable for their roles in the financial crisis," the report reads in part. "TBTF undermines equal treatment, reinforcing the perception of a system tilted in favor of the rich and powerful."
At around the same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an address at George Washington University that "there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which some companies are... too big to fail."
Dodd-Frank Won't Stop 'Too Big To Fail' Banks, Public Poll Says