“The best defense against a massive financial crisis is a popular consensus that too big to fail is too big to exist,” the authors write. “This is at its heart a question of politics, not of economics or of regulatory technicalities.” The book points out that the current concentration of financial and political power is not unlike other moments in American history. President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, challenged the monopoly powers of banker and industrialist J.P. Morgan. “No one thought he could win,” Johnson says in an interview, “but he did succeed in the first prosecution of a corporation under the Sherman Antitrust Act.” Roosevelt, he said, began a process that helped people understand the need to rein in the power of corporate giants, such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, “which was arguably more important as a single company in 1910 than J.P. Morgan was then or J.P. Morgan Chase is now,” says Johnson.
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