In December 2009, President Barack Obama said plaintively that he “did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers.”4 But help them out is what he did, and populist anger at his openhanded policies is hardly surprising. Even more worryingly, neither Obama nor any other leader knows how to prevent too-big-to-fail institutions from fleecing the public all over again. The worst thing about the crisis is that it is likely to be repeated.
