A year ago the U.S. Treasury was pumping billions of borrowed dollars into banks judged to be "too big to fail." This cannot be allowed to happen again.

This page has already suggested one solution. It is a radical one: Make the big banks small enough to fail. Break them up.

Nearly a century ago, the government broke up Standard Oil into the companies that became Exxon, Mobil, Sohio and Chevron. It worked fine. It didn't retard the American economy at all. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has proposed doing the same to J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. It should be done.

There is an obvious way to begin. Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act. That was the original law, passed in the Roosevelt administration, that created deposit insurance. To limit the risk to the...