Romney: I'm not looking to break up big banks

By Peter Schroeder - 04/02/12 12:25 PM ET

Mitt Romney isn't interested in breaking up the nation's biggest banks. Instead, the GOP front-runner says it was a "perfect storm" of events that led to the financial meltdown, not some fundamental imbalance on Wall Street.

"I'm not looking to break apart financial institutions," Romney said in an interview with the conservative American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis. "I think what caused the last collapse was a convergence, almost akin to a perfect storm, of many elements in our economy and regulatory structure."

The GOP presidential front-runner maintained that if the government adopted "modern regulation" and regulators did their job, "there's no reason to think we will go into another crisis of the kind we just endured."

Romney's comments came just days after a head-turning report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that called for a shakeup at the top of the banking industry. In the bank's annual report, President Richard Fisher said that "megabanks" with an outsized presence in the industry pose a threat to the nation's financial stability and continue to drag down the economy, and called for them to be broken up.

And while proponents of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law maintain that the sweeping overhaul brought an end to the "too big to fail" problem by allowing regulators to identify what institutions pose risks to the entire system, as well as putting in place a process to wind them down in an orderly fashion, Fisher maintained that the law "may actually perpetuate" the trend of big banks getting bigger.

GOP presidential candidates have been fiercely critical of Dodd-Frank on the campaign trail, placing it alongside the healthcare reform law as among the first items they vow to repeal after assuming office.

However, the question of what to do with big banks has proven to be much murkier politically. In addition to the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, the Occupy Wall Street movement has called for the nation's largest banks to be broken up, and other left-leaning groups have loudly opposed new bank mergers that would further concentrate financial assets.

And while Romney is not interested in breaking up banks, former GOP candidate Jon Huntsman, who went on to endorse Romney, laid out a plan to do just that while still running for the White House.

Under that plan, banks above a certain size would have to pay a "too big to fail" fee that would cover the costs of potential future bailouts, and that fee would climb until banks reduced their holdings to become more manageable.