Amid the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis a myriad of events unfolded that the general public knew nothing about, writes New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin in a new book titled "Too Big to Fail."

Wall Street fell from the dizzying heights of good fortune to calamity in a matter of months. To a large degree it's still to early to tell whether financiers and politicians involved made the right choices.

"At its core 'Too Big to Fail' is a chronicle of failure -- a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism," writes Sorkin in his behind-the-scenes account.

He spoke with Reuters before giving a lecture at the London School of Economics on Thursday.

(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

So it can be done after all.

Britain is poised to take tough steps to break up the large banks it rescued, setting it in stark contrast to the United States, which seems set on a policy of shoring up the unfair advantages it grants its too-big-to-fail banks while regulating around the edges.

It is quite a change for Britain, which has a sorry history of self-serving self-regulation in financial services combined with limp and outgunned official control.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on Sunday told the BBC that Lloyds, RBS and Northern Rock would be partly broken up and assets sold to new entrants into the banking market. Large existing competitors such as HSBC are expected to be blocked from making bids for the assets.

Britain took over Northern Rock after a run on the bank and its rescue of Lloyds and RBS left it with stakes of 43 and 70 percent, respectively.

It is worth noting that if anything Britain is more dependent on its financial services sector than the United States.

Could it be that Britain has determined that a level playing field, strong competition and a lower risk of a crisis might actually make it more competitive internationally? I certainly think so.

It will without doubt improve the situation for the small businesses and individuals that can’t access international capital markets and depend on the banks for access to credit and other financial services.

Before we get all excited and expect the United States to follow suit with Citibank and Bank of America, it is important to recall that Britain’s Labour government is more or less on its death bed and faces an election in 2010 which the bookies and almost everyone else think it is highly unlikely to win.

There is also the matter of the European Union, which has a say over subsidies such as the ones Britain has showered on the banks. RBS said on Monday that it may be forced by the EU to sell more assets than it had planned. Lloyds is also seen likely to raise additional new capital to allow it to stay outside of an asset insurance scheme Britain is running for the banks and which would involve the government taking yet more equity in the participants.

OH WHAT A CONTRAST

The fact remains that Britain and the EU are saying that more competition is needed and taking steps to ensure that the banks which ended up needing state care are broken up. This must have an impact on how other big banks are ultimately treated, even if they did not receive the same level of direct state aid.

The equity buffer that is being required is also remarkable; the banks should end up with core tier one equity of about 10 percent, four times what they were expected to hold before the crisis.

Contrast all of this with the hopefully named Financial Stability Improvement Act of 2009, now wending its way through Congress. As Harvard Business School professor David Moss points out, as currently drafted this bill won’t even allow the systemically important banks it is designed to control be named, a real Monty Python-esque touch.

Think about it: we won’t even be allowed to know the identities of the firms we are potentially on the hook for. Moss points out that this neatly side-steps the idea of taxing too-whatever-to-fail status as a means of encouraging the behemoths to sell up and avoid the costs. The costs remain with the taxpayer, or potentially with a group of big firms after the fact.

The argument the U.S. administration is making, more or less, is that our complex global economy somehow demands that we have complex huge banks. If we don’t allow huge banks to persist, we’ll choke off growth. If we think we can go back to mom and pop banking, we are simply kidding ourselves. And anyway, if the U.S. doesn’t allow it, foreign banks will just scoop up the cream. With Britain and the European Union taking strong steps, that argument is losing traction. And as for complexity, well I’d have to say that the record of complexity in banking is mixed, to be kind, as far as the deal it gives to taxpayers and consumers of banking services. It would be one thing to argue for huge economies of scale for plain vanilla banking processes like clearing, but it is hard to see why that needs to be combined with derivatives and trading.

It would be nice to think the winds are blowing west across the Atlantic, but this is not usually the case.

(Editing by James Dalgleish)

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

President Barack Obama pledged on Monday "to put an end to the idea that some firms are 'too big to fail.'"  Though he outlined some worthy prescriptions, he failed to face up to the very size and power of the financial institutions that makes "too big to fail" possible.

For the big have gotten even bigger since the start of the financial crisis. At the end of 2007, the Big Four banks -- Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo -- held 32 percent of all deposits in FDIC-insured institutions. As of June 30th, it was 39 percent.

(If the image doesn't load, click here.)

In total, they had $3.8 trillion worth of deposits as of June 30th. Compare that figure to the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund, which showed a balance of just $10.4 billion on the same date.

The FDIC has been the most effective regulator since the onset of the crisis, closing down failed banks in order to limit risk to taxpayers. But its resources are woefully inadequate to deal with the largest institutions. (I am excluding the $500 billion credit line it has at Treasury; those are taxpayers' resources, not FDIC's.)

And that's just the commercial banking side. These banks -- especially Citigroup, Chase and Bank of America -- have huge investment banking operations that are maddeningly complex and, systemically-speaking, very dangerous.

Obama certainly recognizes the problem -- "the system as a whole isn't safe until it is safe from the failure of any individual institution."

But his recommendations -- more stringent capital requirements, stronger rules and a "resolution authority" to cope with systemic meltdowns -- won't solve it once and for all.

To be sure, higher capital requirements are a very good start. They not only give banks a bigger cushion to deal with losses, they also limit the amount of credit they can flush through the system. This is a good thing: Too much credit is the air that inflates dangerous asset bubbles in the first place.

But higher capital requirements won't make too-big-to-fail banks much smaller. At best they will penalize the biggest banks by reducing their returns on equity, giving smaller banks a leg up competitively.

A tax on assets is another good idea to discourage growth, but what we need is more aggressive action to force shrinkage.

For instance, resurrecting a version of Glass-Steagall would be highly sensible. Commercial banks have no business using their federally-insured balance sheets to finance risky investment banking operations. The two functions should be split.

And what ever happened to anti-trust laws? Among them, Citigroup, Chase and Bank of America control two-thirds of the credit card market. That stranglehold gives them significant leverage vis-à-vis consumers.

Another issue is derivatives, which Obama didn't really address.

Notional exposure still totals tens of trillions at the biggest banks. Sure, many of these positions offset one another, but that assumes the daisy chain won't break. To insure market integrity, the biggest players in it all have to get an explicit "there will be no more Lehmans" guarantee.

This gets to the heart of the issue. Though Obama says a return to "normalcy" means emergency rescue facilities can end, it's a safe bet that they'll come right back the next time we have a systemic event.

The only way to ensure we'll never need them again is to eliminate too-big-to-fail banks. The fastest way to achieve that is to break them up.