Banking: Not Only a US Problem

ABN Amro, one of the major banks in the Netherlands has been bought by the Dutch government and will be merged with other dutch bank Fortis, Scottish RBS, and Spain's Santandar to create a bank that will definitely be "too big to fail. The Dutch government just injected 3 billion euros in short term loans as well as 1.4 billion in long term bonds to keep ABN Amro running into what Dutch Finance Minister, Wouter Bos, believes will be a new profitable bank. Seems like Europe is having the same problems as the United States with banks in danger of failing and therefore merging into larger, potentially even more problematic banks such as the enormous CitiGroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and more. If banks were too large to fail before, now they are simply gargantuans whose failures could potentially annihilate an entire economy. Hopefully some types of regulation as well as the not-so-free free markets can keep a global financial meltdown such as the current one from happening again.