And that is just one bank, albeit the largest bank in America by assets. Even a far smaller bank, Goldman Sachs, could bear the brunt of the entire industry's regulatory fines very easily if it had to. Goldman has paid the largest single fine by far as a result of the crisis, $550 million to settle charges that it misled investors about bundles of bad mortgages that were hand-picked by other investors betting against them. That's a lot of money to you and me, but to Goldman -- which, of course, did not admit to the charges -- it's not much. The bank made $8.4 billion in profit in 2010, the year it agreed to the fine. It has made more than $26 billion in the past three years and nearly $27 billion in the three years before the crisis.