Too big to fail

"Too big to fail" is a descriptor assigned to banks or other large corporations[1] which have such a wide and deep investment in the international stock market that, were any of these institutions to go under, a chain reaction would result that would undermine and potentially atomize the world economy. A more truthful phrase would be "too big to be allowed to fail".

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The term originates from Congressional hearings in the 1980's related to the Savings and Loan scandal, but became popular as a kind of meme when Andrew Ross Sorkin used the phrase as a title of his non-fiction accounting of the 2008 crash and the TARP legislation program the American Treasury executed to prevent a cataclysm.

Derivatives
gollark: You can either have a shortage with some random subset of very fast people able to buy them, or have scalpers at least make it possible for people to get GPUs urgently by throwing money at it
gollark: Complaining about scalpers is just going after the obvious issues and ignoring the fact that *there are not enough GPUs*.
gollark: It might lead to more expensive GPUs in the long run due to increased segmentation killing the second hand market.
gollark: Scalpers only exist because demand outstrips supply. Due to mining and shortages.
gollark: What? That's ridiculous.

See also

References
  1. [https://web.archive.org/web/20190603142758/https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/too-big-to-fail.asp "Too Big to Fail," Investopedia. Updated April 30, 2019. Accessed July 17, 2019.]
  2. Senator Elizabeth Warren's First Banking Committee Hearing
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