The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:32:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown: Problems and Solutions – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown: Problems and Solutions https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2010/05/16/the-wall-street-takeover-and-the-next-financial-meltdown-problems-and-solutions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-wall-street-takeover-and-the-next-financial-meltdown-problems-and-solutions https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2010/05/16/the-wall-street-takeover-and-the-next-financial-meltdown-problems-and-solutions/#comments Sun, 16 May 2010 15:05:15 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=9189?d=20100516110515EDT Editor’s Note: This post comes to us from James Kwak, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, and co-founder of the blog The Baseline Scenario.

13 Bankers, the book that I co-write with Simon Johnson, was released one month ago. The book has gotten more attention than I had anticipated, for which I am grateful. Senator Christopher Dodd even told Don Imus that he was reading “13 Banks, by this other fellow,” although he later said this to Ezra Klein:

“I’ve looked at the 13 Bankers book, and so forth, that approach, and I hear this, by the way, not just from them, but from CEOs of major corporations. This is not some left/right question. But I just don’t think that it makes a lot of sense. I don’t think it’ll prevail.”

By far the part of the book that has gotten the most attention is the recommendation, in the last chapter, that our six largest banks be broken up and capped in size at 4 percent of U.S. GDP (with a lower limit for riskier or more interconnected banks). This idea has also been the target of many criticisms, from Paul Krugman (“Breaking up big banks wouldn’t really solve our problems, because it’s perfectly possible to have a financial crisis that mainly takes the form of a run on smaller institutions.”), Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner, among others.

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