Kashkari is himself a veteran of the industry - an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and Pimco, more widely known as the former Bush administration official who presided over the massive bailout of the sector following its collapse in 2008. He says his experience during the crisis persuaded him that the big banks need to be broken up.
I would normally have attributed his views to a libertarian Republican belief that failing enterprises ought to be liquidated rather than propped up, but he has also said that the Dodd-Frank regulations are inadequate and that consideration ought to be given to treating finance as a public utility.
This is a large step forward but still falls short. While a break up of the banking industry would present hedge funds and other investors with lucrative buying opportunities and ease fears of too-big-to-fail, the trend to consolidation would quickly reassert itself, particularly in the face of competitive pressures from European and other banking conglomerates outside the United States.
The central issue is not the size of the admittedly bloated financial industry, but that it needs to be nationalized, rationalized, and reoriented to serve public needs rather than private interests.
Despite their being conditioned to regard public ownership in the abstract as anathema, I’m convinced that most Americans would rally to the specific takeover of the unpopular financial, pharmaceutical, and energy industries were any US politician improbably bold enough to propose any of these as solutions.