…a good number of economists and banking experts are worried. They think the odds of a future bankruptcy-or-bailout dilemma will remain uncomfortably high even if reregulation passes.<\/p>\n
For starters, there are the cross-border problems; in the midst of a crisis, governments may have trouble cooperating. Then there is the fact that the regulators have never before tried to shut down anything as complex as a multibillion-dollar financial firm. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard \u201d\u201d really hard,\u201d\u009d says Robert Steel, who worked on the financial crisis in the Bush Treasury Department and later was chief executive of Wachovia. \u201cAnyone who says they know exactly what we should do is overconfident.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Another former top government official adds, bluntly, \u201cDon\u2019t kid yourself into thinking that if J. P. Morgan were on the rocks, it would disappear.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Above all, no one knows what the next crisis will look like. So no one can be sure exactly how to prevent it. In all likelihood, Wall Street will eventually figure out ways around technocratic rules \u201d\u201d and technocrats \u201d\u201d and create trouble that today\u2019s proposals don\u2019t anticipate.<\/p>\n
The beauty of a bank tax is that it acknowledges as much.<\/p>\n