When 79-year-old retired multimillionaire financier Sanford Weill gave his view last week that big banks should be broken up and strict laws separating commercial banking from more risky investment banking should be reintroduced, financial newspapers and media cleared their best front-page space to air his views.
They had good reason. Weill is not just any old banker in comfortable retirement given to musing on history. He led the movement to smash the United States' Glass-Steagall Act, which from the 1930s until 1999 forced a separation between commercial banking and the securities business.
Weill told CNBC: 'What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not too big to fail.'
He joins a growing chorus of bankers, regulators and economists who say that the too-big-to-fail banks are putting the US and global economic and financial system at risk.
But for him and for others who advocate change, the biggest obstacle to breaking up the banks is entrenched politics.
Weill gave details to show that he had thought through his ideas. He proposed a leverage ratio of 12 to 15 times for commercial banks, which critics say is rather generous for banks not heavily involved in the trading business. He called for an end to off-balance-sheet activities, which would mean that credit card securitisations would have to be brought onto the balance sheet.
