Here is a chart, using the Google ngram tool, showing the frequency of the appearance of the term “financial supermarket” over time.

Note the spike in the mid-1980s. Given that these are books, which appear with a slight lag, I would say that the spike in the media was in the early 1980s.

At this panel, I don’t know whether I will have time to get into the history of bank concentration in the U.S., but here it is.

1. The market share of the largest banks follows a hockey stick pattern since 1950. It stayed very low until the late 1970s, and then around 1980 it started to grow exponentially. Growth of banks had been retarded by ceilings on deposit interest rates, branching restrictions, and Glass-Steagall restrictions. Banks had been trying to find loopholes and ways around these restrictions, and regulators had been trying to close the loopholes. Then, during the period 1979-1994, the regulators stopped trying to maintain the restrictions, and instead cooperated in ending them. That was when the hockey stick took off.

2. The regulators thought that this would bring more competition and consumer benefits. What the banks had in mind was something else. That is where the chart comes in. The bankers all thought that “cross-selling” and “one-stop shopping” would be killer strategies in consumer banking. In 1981, when Sears bought Dean Witter, many pundits thought that putting a brokerage firm inside a department store was going to be a total game-changer.

3. It turned out, though, that consumers did not flock to brokerage firms in department stores, or to any of the other one-stop-shopping experiments in financial services. The economies of scope just weren’t there.

4. Meanwhile, concentration in banking soared thanks to mergers and acquisitions. I’ve read that JP Morgan Chase is the product of 37 mergers and Bank of America is the product of 50. All of these took place within the past 35 years.

5. Just five years into this exponential growth process, Continental Illinois became insolvent, and that was when “too big to fail” began. So out of the 35 years where we were on the exponential part of the hockey stick, 30 of them have taken place under a “too big to fail” regime. In short, the concentration in banking got started during the “financial supermarket” bubble, and from then on was supported, if not propelled, by “too big to fail.” But the market share of the biggest banks is not something that grew naturally and organically out of superior business processes.

6. As another historical point, when the S&L crisis hit, the government set up the Resolution Trust Corporation. Each failing institution was divided into a “good bank” and a “bad bank,” with the good bank merged into another bank and the assets of the bad bank bought by the RTC. While this was a somewhat distasteful bailout, it was conducted under the rule of law. When TARP was enacted in 2008, Congress and the public were led to expect something similar to the RTC, with TARP used to buy “toxic assets” in a blind, neutral way. Instead they ended up calling the biggest banks into a room and “injecting” TARP funds into them. They also spent TARP funds on restructuring General Motors. It was the opposite of government acting in a predicable, law-governed way. It was Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner making ad hoc, personal decisions. I think that in the U.S., that is what bank concentration leads to–arbitrary use of power. That is why as a libertarian I do not think that allowing banks to become too big to fail is desirable.