Big US Banks May Be Headed For Extinction—And Soon

In the world of banking, too-big-to-fail may be in the process of morphing into too-big-to-exist.

After hundreds of billions in federal aid and even more in lost investment capital, both the government and investors may be ready for a big sea change.

The only question, for some, is how quickly it will happen.

“In the next few months, we’ll see the tacitly nationalized banks—Bank of America, Citigroup [C 4.02 0.21 (+5.51%) ] —sold off rapidly into pieces, turned into much smaller banks,” Sanders Morris Harris Group Chairman George Ball predicted on CNBC Thursday, adding the government wants to send a strong message, to “punish too-big-to-fail banks that have blotted their copy and not exonerate their management.”

“Five years from now, these banks will be broken up,” is how FBR Capital Markets bank analyst Paul J Miller sees it.

From Washington to Wall Street to Main Street, a dramatic change in conventional thinking appears to underway.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“Some institutions are too big to exist, because they are too interconnected,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told CNBC earlier this week. “The regulators can’t regulate them.”

That conclusion became painfully obvious in the two faces of the financial crisis.

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