Say it isn't so.

Why are those the only two choices? What about stronger regulation? The federal government is probably the biggest bank of all, in many ways. Do we break up its banking functions, too?

Who gets to define which banks are too big to fail? The president? Congress? A commission? Courts? Who gets to approve or disapprove those decisions?

What process is used to break them up? Breaking up a big corporation is a painfully complicated. Who oversees that? What principles are involved? Do we create a lot of regional banks? Smaller national banks?

What about shadow banking institutions, like the ones whose failures precipitated the 2008 financial crisis? What do we do about them?

I mean, the idea of banks that are too big to fail are a problem, but we need more than bumper-sticker solutions.

being presented to us by our two leading Democratic candidates in this primary. One has set a goal TO break them up, the other viable candidate espouses breaking them up only IF it should become necessary. To say that they are now "too big to fail" is common knowledge, but only one position intends to correct that immediately.

Accurate descriptions would take a lot more space to describe, and a lot more details to fill in. Depending on how each of those was filled in, I could see myself going one way or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-and-wall-street-tycoons.html?_r=0

For what it’s worth, Mrs. Clinton had the better case. Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.