'Too Big to Fail' still thriving

Five years after Lehman Brothers' seismic bust and just two years after euro member Greece defaulted, the concept of being too big or too strategic to fail is alive and well. Although unwritten government guarantees of big banks have been at the heart of taxpayer outrage over being left on the hook for the missteps of giant corporations, few politicians or voters are keen to embrace another 'Lehman moment' or the global economic implosion that ensued. Yet, as an International Monetary Fund study detailed this week, there's still a running assumption that governments would again rescue the biggest banks in the event of another panic. The IMF found that at least through 2012 the euro zone's biggest banks still benefited from an implicit taxpayer subsidy of $90 billion to $300 billion.

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