Despite the many years that have passed since the global
financial crisis, its causes and consequences continue to demand
attention from industry and policymakers alike.
At the heart of the crisis was the dilemma posed by banks which
were held to be "too-big-to-fail" (TBTF). Their sheer
size, complexity and inter-connectedness made the prospect of their
failure too harmful to contemplate. As a consequence, when those
banks got into trouble, governments around the world chose to come
to their rescue with financial aid – or
"bail-outs".
The post-crisis consensus was that the TBTF problem had to be
eliminated. A regulatory agenda was set out by the Financial
Stability Board (FSB) to make it possible for large banks to fail
in an orderly and predictable way – what we now know as bank
resolution. But even in 2016, questions remain around whether the
world's largest banks are still too big, too complex or too
interconnected to fail, and whether this is a problem that can
