As the banking industry careens from one disaster to another, Swiss regulators forced big Swiss bank UBS to purchase Credit Suisse, another large bank.

As a result, they created a single giant bank with no competitors. It’s a bizarre system for a country that prides itself on its free and fair financial system.

But the US is headed down the same path.

What happened in Switzerland is the same thing that happened in America and Europe 15 years ago: big banks are being forced to buy failing smaller banks to keep stability in the banking sector.

But instead of helping consumers, they’re creating a long-term problem where only large banks can exist because people aren’t reacting with fear to the idea that big banks aren’t big enough but rather that they aren’t solvent enough to withstand billions of dollars worth of defaults on poorly created mortgage debt.

The government isn’t reducing risk to consumers and the sector by forcing the big banks to buy smaller ones; they’re just gathering the risk into one large pot.

The US created a “too big to fail” phenomenon, built on the back of taxpayer guarantees that the government wouldn’t let the sector collapse. Seeing themselves as untouchable, big banks got bigger – and loosened lending practices which created more insolvency issues.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, which would “put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all.” And it may have, except that former President Donald Trump repealed much of the law.

Now, large banks see themselves as unbeholden to any serious attempt to avert a financial crisis because the government will have to bail them out – or sell themselves to one another, eventually bringing America to the point where we have just one or two mega-banks; it’s a worrying prospect.