David Cho

Rather than wait for borrowers to repay loans, banks were adopting a technique called securitization. The banks created pools of loans and sold investors the right to collect portions of the inflowing payments. The bank got its money upfront. Equally important, under accounting rules it was allowed to report that the loans had been sold, and therefore it did not need to hold any additional capital. But in many cases, the bank still pledged to cover losses if borrowers defaulted.

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When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.