But Greek voters are equally certain that it's unfair for them to suffer years of slim government budgets and high unemployment in order to repay foreign banks and richer northern neighbors, which have reaped outsized benefits from closer European integration.
But once banks get a customer he's pretty much theirs for good.
Next, he pointed out that full nationalization of a financial institution might trigger systemic shocks, as investors retreated from other banks, creating exactly the kind of panic that nationalization was intended to prevent.
The big banks have the further advantage of their brands, however tattered the brands may be.
It's possible, in fact, that the crisis, instead of eroding the reputational advantages of the big banks, ended up bolstering them.
This isn't because the big banks have been making a special effort to be customer-friendly.
Instead, they typically pay lower interest rates on deposits than smaller banks do, and charge higher interest rates on loans.
If forced to say, I would go the Swedish route; but of course we can't do that unless we're prepared to put all troubled banks in receivership.
It's not, after all, as if the U.S. economy has never had to deal with big insolvent banks before.
It's been expensive to bail out the banks, but as Lehman Brothers demonstrated, it would have been far more costly to let them go under.
So, at a time when banks are failing with some regularity, the size and ubiquity of these big banks is reassuring.
