Financial experts: No, Mr. President, your bill doesn't end bailouts

I cannot find any experts — of any party — who are willing to agree with Obama on this one.

“We’re not seeing a very forceful step on the too-big-to-fail problem,” said Carmen Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “If there’s any doubt that the crisis may be systemic, we will bail out again.”

So, if a major bank says, “Hey, save us or the economy will go under,” the government’s going to save the bank. Full stop.

We did find one expert, Doug Elliott of the Brookings Institution, who is actually a huge fan of the regulatory reform bills. He says they bring a bunch of changes that make our economy safer.

But they don’t end too big to fail, he said. The only way to do that is to break them up so that “they’re so small that we don’t care” if they fail.