Bernanke Says U.S. Must End ‘Too Big to Fail’ Bank Subsidy

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said he wants to end investor perceptions that the largest U.S. financial institutions will be given taxpayer bailouts to prevent a collapse.

“We need to stop too-big-to-fail,” Bernanke said in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in Washington today in response to a question from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. “As somebody who’s spent a lot of late nights trying to deal with these problems and the crisis, I would very much like to have the confidence that we could close down a large institution without causing damage to the rest of the economy.”