Princeton professor Harold James points a change in global banking's big picture. Whereas the 1990s financial liberalization led bankers to seek out equally liberal regulatory regimes, it has become more important today to find deep governmental pockets to backstop the system.

The explanation of why the obvious lessons of the crisis are being not drawn lies in the curious character of financial activity. Banking is inherently competitive; but at the same time, it is not an industry where competition ever worked very well.
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Government reactions are full of paradoxes. The more we insist that a banking system should be competitive, the greater the risks that individual banks will take. The more governments are prepared to step in, and the greater the resources of those governments, the more big banks and big countries will be favored.