EDITORIAL: "Obama erects a Maginot line: Overdue confrontation with banks is terrible thing to waste," Financial Times, 23 January 2010. OPINION: "The President's Bank Reforms Don't Add Up," by Peter J. Wallison, Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2010. OBAMA AND WALL STREET: "The Big Get Bigger | U.S. banks with more than $10 billion in assets are increasingly dominating the industry," FDIC data, Wall Street Journal, 23-24 January 2010. OBAMA AND WALL STREET: "U.S. Plan Fuels Global Fire for Financial Regulation," by Stephen Fidler, Alessandra Galloni and Dave Kansas,

The FT says that banning banks from trading on their own book (deposits) will not stop them from putting those holdings at risk, so the so-called Volcker Rule is a Maginot Line-like barrier. The rule also is viewed as doing nothing to stop the non-bank parts of the financial system from creating danger. Then this judgment, which I find especially damaging to Obama:

For all its warts, a genuine effort at regulatory reform was wriggling its way through Congress--and at least a modicum of attention was being paid to coordinating such reforms at a global level. All this has now been blown out of the water by a White House seized by political panic.

My last cite in the series suggests that global momentum toward reform has not been retarded by Obama's perceived panic. And although Wallison's point is a good one (No one knows what "too big" really is), it is interesting to note how super-big banks are dominating more and more in terms of total assets, total liabilities, net interest income, non-interest income, net income--across the board. Most of the percentage shares held by the $10B-plus banks at the end of the 1990s ranged in the 60-to-70 percent band. Now all of those measures stand around 80% or higher (especially the noninterest income, where the share is almost 90%, meaning the biggies are dominating the experiments).