On October 18, federal regulators released Prudential Financial—the last remaining systemically important nonbank financial institution—from enhanced government oversight. This Essay contends that Prudential's deregulation was both unwise and illegal. In removing Prudential's “systemically...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers and scholars have fixated on the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks. This fixation, however, overlooks the historically dominant pattern in banking crises: the contemporaneous failure of many small institutions. We call this blind spot the...