President Obama has nominated a community banker to the board of the Federal Reserve.  This nomination met with favorable comments from Senator Sherrod Brown, Fed board chair Janet Yellen and Frank Keating. It maybe time to take community banking functions away from the big banks, or me at least give them a ,choice between community baking sand investment banking.  Clearly a bank like JP Morgan Chase which only make 20 percent of its money on these functions would prefer to be an investment bank.   Goldman Sachs’ Richard Ramsden today suggests that the JPMorgan Chase that Jamie Dimon has taken years building would be worth more in pieces.  Can a break up be far behind?

The problem wirh break up of course is that the 80 percent of JP Morgan Chase’s acitivities that fall outside community banking might not be covered by tax payer dollars.  At any rate, they should not be.

An interesting side note:  Small banks benefit from regulation.  Is the flip side of this statement also true?