"Too big to fail" is a really idiotic description

[brasssun]

It is increasingly annoying me that anyone is referring to a failing company as "too big to fail."

If a company is failing, then it is clearly capable of failing.

If, instead, the issue is that it's too big for the company to be allowed to fail, then it seems to me that these companies need to be downsized immediately. We shouldn't want to save

Comments

[tirerim]

I think part of the problem is that in the short term, once they're failing there's no good way to break them up and actually make the problem smaller. The only way to do it is to not allow them to get so big in the first place, and that's basically antithetical to this country's philosophy of capitalism.

In a sense, "too big to fail" is like a really huge hostage situation -- it's basically like in "The Dark Knight Rises". There's no way to make the hostage situation smaller without dooming everyone.

[brasssun]

Yeah, but maybe there should be a single save offered and the price of being saved is that you have to be broken into smaller companies after the hostages have been released. They're allowed to get that big, but if they need a bail out, then there are consequences. They shouldn't get to argue that now they're successful again and have the freedom to remain large. The part where "too big to fail" has started changing into "too big to jail" is part of what's getting to me. There shouldn't be anything that's too big for consequences.