Oh you dear, sweet Washington Post. Whatever will we do with you when you, one of three or four papers of record in our modern time, consider this to be journalism worthy of ink and column space? Sit down everyone, and prepare to have your minds blown by this news that no one could have possibly seen coming.

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation’s leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

Three banks hold around 40% of all the money on deposit in the US right now.  If that concerns you, you might be FDIC chairman Sheila Bair, who is none too amused at the prospect of so few controlling so much, and possibly now feeling entitled to government support if they begin failing – which could lead to them returning to the same kinds of risk-taking that got us here in the first place.

Now, of course, plans to make plans are underway to begin looking at ways to potentially break up these Frankenbanks before they doom us all and before Jamie Dimon declares 270 Park a sovereign nation.