Jim Grant on the Too Big to Fail banking doctrine (1990)

If anything is new about banking in the 1980s, it is the substitution of federal guarantees for the liquidity of individual banks. It is the policy that, even in smaller institutions, depositors will be protected. It is this regulatory sea change that distinguishes the current debt expansion from so many earlier ones. Rothbard’s theory holds that a run-resistant, semi-socialized, fractional reserve banking system is a house of cards. 

~ Jim Grant, "Bring Back the Bank Run," The Free Market, February 1990