Dean Baker

How much do "Too Big to Fail" Banks cost us? Try $34 billion a year

the total taxpayer subsidy for the 18 large bank holding companies was $34.1 billion a year.

This is a quote from Dean Baker's study, The Value of the “Too Big to Fail” Big Bank Subsidy

Baker calculates the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for borrowing interest, the interest rate for 18 TBTF (too big to fail) banks vs. smaller ones. It's much lower, due to the new policy that these favored banks will never be allowed fail, regardless of their balance sheets.

The government guarantee TBTF becomes extended to investors and lenders to these banks, resulting in overall lower costs of doing business than our network of regional and smaller banks. Nice huh? That's competition and free markets, uh huh.

The full paragraph: