Professor Edward Kane:

That is a huge part of the problem but the more general problem is recognition that taxpayers have a position. To take Bank of America, which I know a lot about, it was the biggest bank in the United States at one point. It made a terrible acquisition of a firm called Countrywide that had been making mortgages that were almost insane. Bank of America added this very troubled firm to its position. The only way to justify this is to argue that Bank of America made itself even harder to fail because it was now even messier for authorities to jump in and try to pull everything apart and put it back together again. Did I answer the Deputy's question?