Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Minireview cung cấp cho các bạn kiến thức về ngành y đề tài: Too big to succeed? | Comment Too big to succeed Gregory A Petsko Address Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center Brandeis University Waltham MA 02454-9110 USA. Email petsko@ Published 30 March 2009 Genome Biology 2009 10 103 doi gb-2009-l0-3-l03 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http 2009 l0 3 l03 2009 BioMed Central Ltd We hear the phrase too big to fail a lot these days. It means a company that is so vital to the national economy that its demise would be catastrophic so the government will go to extraordinary lengths to keep it afloat. General Motors Corporation the sinking US car maker is said to be too big to fail. Lehman Brothers the investment bank whose collapse precipitated financial crises around the world was too big to fail - although George W Bush s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson didn t realize that in time. And as the world credit market tries to become unstuck before a global depression sets in we hear the same thing about two US bank holding companies Bank of America and Citibank. But what exactly does it take to make a company too big to fail In the case of General Motors it is the huge number of jobs that would be lost if it went under but that consideration doesn t apply to a financial services firm - at least not directly. In the case of banks it s the magnitude of the monetary loss that matters. Bank of America has assets of approximately trillion and Citibank has assets of around trillion. The GDP of the United States is 14 trillion so each of these banks has assets in excess of 14 of the yearly output of the largest economy on Earth. That s too big to fail. But I would argue that if you can be too big to fail you also can be too big to succeed. Your very size can be your undoing as it may have been for the huge lumbering dinosaurs who weren t flexible enough to survive the global catastrophe that our small furry mammalian ancestors were able to .
