Breaking Up Banks is Hard to Do

It's especially hard from on the inside.  Michael Lewis thinks we should be breaking up the big banks. In a book review of all places, Mr. Lewis, of Moneyball, Blind Side, and The Big Short fame, says banks like Goldman Sachs should be broken up.  How broken up?:

The ultimate goal should be to create institutions so dull and easy to understand that, when a young man who works for one of them walks into a publisher's office and offers to write up his experiences, the publisher looks at him blankly and asks, "Why would anyone want to read that?" 

This is very similar to what Paul Krugman was saying back during Congressional negotiations over what would become the Dodd-Frank bill. Essentially, Krugman argued and Lewis appears to concur with, banks should be boring. They should make money on interest, but not too much, and they shouldn't be playing with house money.

I would have to agree. Banks, federally insured, deposit receiving banks, should be the most boring thing in the world. How long did banks exist without the fancy monetary instruments they created ahead of the crash? How long had banks been pillars of their community before they started betting with the house money? Have banks learned nothing from credit unions?

I like my dollars in bill form, I like my beer cold, and I like my banks boring. If we need to break them up to prevent another calamity, then that's what we need to do.