TBTF is a four letter word
When I was reading Morgan's article about Greenspan the other day, I got to this part:
4. On "too big to fail":
"Federal Reserve research had been unable to find economies of scale in banking beyond a modest-sized institution."
Hear that, JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon? Now quit acting like civilization will be forced back into hunting and gathering if four banks don't control the economy.
and I said... "Wait, what?" then "Really?" then "Hmmmmm..."
So I got out my deerstalker cap and my pipe and I started investigating. What I found was pretty interesting. There actually has been a fairly sizeable body of work suggesting that bank mergers beyond a certain size don't increase banking efficiency... and, in fact, they might actually have diseconomies of scale beyond a certain point.
The result of my digging is this article on Fool.com today.
For anyone that would like to check out the source docs I used, here's a link to the Fed research paper and here's a link to the speech on the BoA merger.