Giant Among Giants

With $2.3 trillion in total assets as of the end of the first quarter, J.P. Morgan is more massive than Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) ($951 billion), Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) ($781 billion) and U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) ($341 billion) combined.

Doesn't that mean J.P. Morgan is clearly too big to fail?

"Of course it is. It's way too big to fail," said Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College.

J.P. Morgan is hardly the only gigantic bank. The list of firms that the government wouldn't allow to fail likely includes Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Citigroup (NYSE:C), Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) and investment banks Goldman and Morgan.

There are a slew of foreign financial institutions whose respective governments would also need to race to their rescue, including Switzerland's UBS (NYSE:UBS) and Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS), the U.K.'s Barclays (NYSE:BCS) and HSBC (NYSE:HBC), France's Societe Generale, Germany's Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB) and the Royal Bank of Canada (NYSE:RY).