JIM LEHRER: Next tonight: dealing with the financial industry's too-big-to-fail problem.

"NewsHour" congressional correspondent Kwame Holman begins our coverage.

KWAME HOLMAN: Since the financial crisis hit last September, the government has injected hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars into firms such as Bank of America, Citigroup, and AIG, all deemed too big to fail.

In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the credit crisis that followed it, government officials repeatedly have said they had no other option.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained his thinking during a "NewsHour" forum this summer.

BEN BERNANKE, chairman, Federal Reserve: The problem we have is that, in a financial crisis, if you let the big firms collapse in a...