Those Poor American Banks

Jamie Dimon has been claiming that the new regulations imposed on banks are "anti-american". The new regulations would set higher standards for the capital requirements, the ratio of equity to debt, that banks have to hold. Dimon's claim is that by forcing the banks to hold high capital requirement, in essence to make them safer, is un-american because they were set by Basel III, the international banking body that determines what the adequate levels of capital requirements are. We are coming out of a time (are we?) where it is obvious that banks had very low capital requirements and so were able to leverage themselves to up to 35 times their equity. American banks were given a chance to manage themselves with little to no government regulation, and they failed spectacularly. I think what is un-american is letting a oligarchical set of banks ruin the lives of millions of Americans. In all honesty, the new capital requirements are not nearly strict enough. The Swiss have imposed a CR (capital requirement) of nearly 20% on their banks due to the powerful place they occupy in the economy and other countries like Britain are considering similar measures. The United States has let its banking sector run wild and it needs to begin to reign it in.