Where I disagree here is that I don't see a forced absorption being needed if the assets are worth it. There may very well be red tape that needs to be cut or expedited in an extreme scenario, but if a bank's assets are still worth any value another bank will buy them for a price that benefits them. The government only needs to force the acquisition, including financial assistance or guarantees, if the bank assets have no net value.
> It begs the question, if these entities hold such a huge portion of the nation's financial destiny in their hands, why are they not beholden to the public?
This I totally agree with, though I land on the opposite direction. Should entities be allowed to be so large that they realistically need to be beholden to the public? I'd rather see bank protections removed, that would incentivize smaller banks that are inherently more beholden to their depositors.
Nor can you try to slowly unroll their assets piecemeal on any normal human time-scale, and big parts of the organization's 100's of billions of dollars of value prop are things you can't sell in the first place, like principal arbitrageur status.
I'm not defending the banks here, and in fact this is one of a few large reasons why the US has had such huge conflicts over establishing both a national bank, and national governance of the banks. It begs the question, if these entities hold such a huge portion of the nation's financial destiny in their hands, why are they not beholden to the public?