Introduction: addressing ‘too big to fail’ After the global financial crisis of 2007/08, and the severe and lingering consequences thereof on the global economy, one of the key items on the agenda of the G-20 (the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) was to address the ‘too big to fail’ problem. During the past couple of decades, financial sectors have outgrown the size of their national economies and have expanded beyond their national borders. The individual balance sheets of large, global financial conglomerates are now larger than those of most economies. For example, the balance sheet of JP Morgan Chase amounted to US$2,6 trillion in 2014 – larger than the gross domestic product, or GDP, of all but the six largest economies in the world1.