The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is out with its annual report on America’s banking industry – and the numbers are shocking. Currently – only 5 banks control more than half of all the industry’s assets. That’s right – the top 5 banks in America own 52% of all the wealth in the finance sector. To put that in perspective – in 1970 – the top 5 banks controlled only 17% of the industry’s assets. Not only that – the total wealth owned by the top 10 banks in the nation now equals half of America’s total GDP.

These startling numbers have prompted the President of the Dallas Fed – Richard Fisher – to call for the breaking up of the big banks – warning that they’ve become so large they not only threaten the Federal Reserve’s ability to conduct monetary policy – but also “erode faith in American capitalism.” Fisher also called for tough new financial reforms to strengthen the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. Thanks to three decades of Reaganomic deregulation of Wall Street – we’ve all become slaves to the banksters.

As President Grover Cleveland said in his 1888 State of the Union address to a nation then under the control of the Robber Barons, "Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters." Here we are again. It’s time to break up Wall Street before they crash our economy for a second time in just a few years.