Washington Post

In his April 30 op-ed "Time to bridle the mega-banks," Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) stated the case for his proposal to limit the size of our country's financial institutions. "Too big to fail is simply too big," he wrote.

The problem of "too big to fail" is not that some institutions are large; the problem is that there is no statutory authority to wind down a failing financial conglomerate the way that the FDIC can wind down a bank. Congress must act to provide the legal authority and procedural protocol for seizing and winding down even the largest, most interconnected and complex entities.

Large financial institutions provide significant value and stability to our economy. Lawrence H. Summers, director of President Obama's National Economic Council, recently said that "to try to break banks up into a lot of little pieces would hurt our ability to serve large companies and hurt the competitiveness of the United States."

More effective supervision, coupled with the authority to seize and wind down failing institutions, is the most appropriate way to end "too big to fail" -- not arbitrarily and preemptively breaking up healthy companies.

Rob Nichols, Chevy Chase

The writer is president and chief operating officer of the Financial Services Forum, a nonpartisan economic policy organization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050405047_pf.html