“Too big to fail” has got to be among the most sinister set of words ever loosed onto the public. Its use to describe a sizing or measuring error, or as Eggplant says “an upper limit that any organization can grow to beyond which it becomes ungovernable”, is not the half of it.

It’s actually the negation of the free market.

Citi for example has been bailed out four times since it became, in the late 900′s with its politically-escorted buy-up of Travelers and others, combined with the simultaneous defanging of Glass-Steagull, “TBTF”.

What does it do to the competition, then to the industry, then to the economy, then to the politics of international trade, when –let’s stay with Citi as just an example –a political TBTF designation amounts to an entirely different category definition of ‘risk’ ? All the old relationships fall out of comprehensibility.

In banking, investors seek returns, and if you’re NOT TBTF then those who are will kill you –unless you start taking risks as if you’re TBTF.

TBTF is a gigantic lie put forth by those who want their form of government to be TBTF. It’s a sweet sounding innocent little phrase, like Arbeit Macht Frei –and it is being used in the same way, if not yet at the same end result intensity.