With the recent publication of its final rule, the federal government's Financial Stability Oversight Council is now in position to designate certain nonbank firms as "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs). There is probably no aspect of the Dodd-Frank Act that will have more damaging effects on competition in the U.S. financial system.

What is of most concern is the crisis has spread to Italy and Spain, and even the French banks have trouble funding themselves. This isn’t just the European periphery. It’s the heart of the European banking system and the whole European experiment.

We simply have to face the fact that banking is fundamentally risky. As I decided long ago when working in banks, the reason we needed to wear dark suits and have classic buildings was to look conservative in order to offset the real riskiness of what we were doing. 

What about the Canadian banking system allowed it to survive the recent worldwide slowdown without a single bank failure? What can the United States learn from Canada about sound banking?

Judging by the financial market's renewed unease about Italy and Spain over the past week it would seem that all that the European Central Bank's €1 trillion liquidity injection in the European banking system bought was around four months of relative market calm.

Instead of placing undue reliance on all-too-fallible bank supervisors and regulators, should we not now be considering doing something serious about the perverse incentives to overly risky bank lending, as well as to the ‘too big to fail’ problem in the US and global banking systems.

A potential European banking crisis would spill over to the US financial system, which has very close links to the European banking system.

These days, billions of dollars is spoken of as pocket change. A by-product of massive government debt burdens and decades of cheap cash from central banks is the notion that, while solvency might be important, liquidity should be easy to find. Particularly for financial institutions, the official state position appears...