CATO’s Mark Calabria writes in the New York Post that the financial reform bill’s “too big to fail” provisions would not necessarily have applied to AIG because financial institutions structured as insurance companies aren’t automatically covered:

The Senate bill, sponsored by Democrat Chris Dodd, claims to subject all “too big to fail” institutions to greater federal supervision, but in fact it only mandates such regulation for bank-holding companies. Regulators would have to make a case-by-case decision on whether to apply it to other financial companies.