Second verse, same as the first?

Niall Ferguson, Wall Street’s New Gilded Age, in Newsweek, an excerpt or 2:

Now, barely a year after one of the worst crises in all financial history, we seem to have returned to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century—the last time bankers came close to ruling America. A few Wall Street giants, led by none other than -JPMorgan, are back to making serious money and paying million-dollar bonuses. Meanwhile, every month, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans face foreclosure or unemployment because of a crisis caused by … a few Wall Street giants.

And what makes the losers in this crisis really mad is the fact that there's now one law for the small debtors and another for big ones. If you lose your job and fall behind on your $1,500 monthly mortgage payment, no one's going to bail you out. But Citigroup can lose $27.7 billion (as it did last year) and count on the federal government to hand it $45 billion.

A hundred years ago, people angrily compared the House of Rothschild to a giant octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the U.S. economy. Today it's the turn of Goldman Sachs to be likened to a "great vampire squid."

Right now we don't need a charade in which politicians claim they are going to regulate the big banks more tightly. (These are the same politicians who were supposed to be regulating Fannie and Freddie, remember.) What's needed is a serious application of antitrust law to the financial-services sector and a speedy end to institutions that are "too big to fail."

In particular, the government needs to clarify that federal insurance applies only to bank deposits and that bank bondholders will no longer protected, as they have been in this crisis. In other words, when a bank goes bankrupt, the creditors should take the hit, not the taxpayers.