I am little confused by your reply. I said only the power of a strong federal government can take on the more powerful too big to fail banks, not that a strong

I am little confused by your reply. I said only the power of a strong federal government can take on the more powerful too big to fail banks, not that a stronger government would be effective if everything else stays the way it is. Government is neutral, much like technology is neutral, it can be used either for good or bad purposes, depending on who controls it. Right now, it is very much controlled by the big banks, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. Indeed your remark about regulations demonstrates exactly the point I was trying to make. Namely, that only the power of the federal government is strong enough to enforce things like regulations, which in principle are an effective counter measure against fraud and abuse in the financial system. It's not just in principle either, during the great depression, many reforms were put in place, such as glass-steigel, which stabilized the financial system for the longest period of time in american history; and many people point to the undoing of those reforms as a major contribution to the current crises. A standard response to the above is to say: the new deal reforms didn't get america out of the depression, it was world war 2. Indeed, the reforms of the new deal were only partially effective because they didn't go far enough; and it was only when the entire population was mobilized behind the war effort that the government was able to intervene in the economy even more intensely than it had previously. We can ask the interesting question: why do governments exist at all? It's because society is divided into separate factions which compete with each other. Modern society is full of contraindications, which expresses itself as conflict between the competing factions. As part of this power struggle, governments are formed with the purpose of setting up bodies of armed men, as well as other mechanisms, in order to enforce the domination of one set of these factions over the others. If you have a better idea of how serious systemic problems like the current financial crises can be solved, without a strong federal government, I would be interested to know what that is. Or do you just think the situation is totally hopeless?