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Surprise, surprise! Last week, the Justice Department announced it wasn’t going to prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for its shady activities during the mortgage crisis. The same day, Goldman disclosed in a regulatory filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had dropped an investigation into a troubled $1.3 billion residential mortgage-backed securities deal launched in 2006.

Time is running out for prosecutors to file cases against big banks for activities that triggered the 2007-2009 financial crisis, since statutes of limitations set deadlines for launching prosecutions for fraud and other financial crimes. If prosecutors don’t start lawsuits before these deadlines expire, the big banks will, once again, have got off scot-free.

Failure to pursue banks, culpable management and employees for their complicity in causing the financial crisis is one of six bad policies that ensure we’re likely to see another bust-up of a big U.S. bank — sooner rather than later.

Who’s going to pay the price for such a failure?  We will, of course. Uncle Sam’s policy of allowing banks to get too big to fail means we’ll all be left holding the bag when that collapse occurs – and another banking bailout is necessary.

1. Too big to fail

Thirty years of financial deregulation have seen unprecedented concentration of the financial sector. Before, financial firms were limited both in where they could do business and the types of business they could do. This prevented a big banking blowup in the U.S. for more than 50 years.

Banks used to be limited to owning branches within individual states.  When a bank got into trouble-and some did — losses stayed confined. Regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) could clean up the mess and preserve depositors’ assets, without unduly burdening taxpayers. But after changes culminating in the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act in 1994, those restrictions vanished.