New York

Paulson: “Too Big to Fail” Part of the Problem 

If anything is clear as the housing and mortgage debacle stumbles seemingly ever-forward, it’s that the government’s response to the crisis has proven the theory that some institutions really are too big to fail; the orchestrated take-over of Bear Stearns & Cos. in March, which left the Federal Reserve holding the bag on roughly $30 billion in the Wall Street firm’s hardest-to-value assets, may have set the precedent, but it surely hasn’t ended there.