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.

The Dodd-Frank legislation has many problems and omissions, and much is still uncertain about implementation. But the new liquidation authority provides for the possibility of making it so that future crises do not involve the bailouts of creditors that truly embodied the problem of having banks that are too big to fail.

Many Americans resent banks' roles in the financial crisis and in home foreclosures, and are angered at huge salaries paid by firms that received taxpayer money. These feelings are understandable, but not the entire picture.

The Huntsman plan for regulatory reform is a good effort, but it fails to come close to accomplishing the one major goal that it highlights in its summary description — “ending” too-big-to-fail (TBTF).

For the U.S. to prevail in this game of chicken, it will have to accept two basic premises that it has shied away from thus far. First, that the Pakistani army is an adversary, if not an enemy. Second, that the U.S. can only win if the generals at army headquarters in Rawalpindi cease to believe that America will always blink first.

While Too Big to Fail rounds off some corners, the movie gets the basic story right: the crisis resulted from serious mistakes made by many people, especially on Wall Street and in government. But these people are not portrayed as evil; they just made mistakes.

Greve argues that a state bankruptcy option would represent a step towards restoring fiscal sanity--as long as it succeeds in breaking the stranglehold of public-sector unions over state politics and budgets.

The states' fiscal crisis is structural, not cyclical. Real recovery and reform will require drastic changes to our federal architecture.