Simon Johnson writes today about the scourge of banks that are too big to fail. Cyprus is the latest example of what happens when a megabank fails, and it's fresh on everyone's minds:

The good news at the end of last week was that the Senate unanimously decided that the United States should go in another direction, by ending the funding advantages of megabanks.

....But making last week even more decisive, [Ben] Bernanke’s language shifted significantly....saying in the clearest possible terms during a news conference on March 20: “Too big to fail is not solved and gone,” adding, “It’s still here.” And in case anyone did not fully grasp his message, Mr. Bernanke explained, “Too big to fail was a major source of the crisis, and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that successfully.”

Now that the policy consensus has shifted, how exactly policy plays out remains to be seen....

Hmmm. This seems optimistic. Has the policy consensus really shifted? I hope I'm wrong, but what we're seeing right now seems more like one of those little boomlets that crop up and then disappear regularly. Remember NGDP targeting? For a period of a few weeks when it got mentioned in a set of Fed minutes, the economics blogosphere couldn't get enough of it. But it was never going anywhere, and it never did.

But enough pessimism! If there's any movement at all toward going beyond Dodd-Frank to make banks safer, that's good news. I've always been skeptical, on both political and practical grounds, that big banks can literally be broken up or their size capped, but they can certainly be made safer by requiring much higher capital levels. And you could probably go a long way toward encouraging smaller banks by introducing a formula that set higher capital levels for bigger banks. Who knows what would happen if required capital was a minimum of 10 percent or, say, double your bank's assets as a percentage of U.S. GDP? If a bank the size of Citigroup had to hold twice the capital of a smaller bank, that would certainly provide a big incentive to break up.

I don't know how feasible this kind of thing is on a national basis, and further international action doesn't seem to be in the cards these days. But every little bit helps. We'll see if the coming months produce anything more than a purely symbolic vote on a nonbinding resolution by the Senate.

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I thought we had made some progress in understanding and fighting colony collapse disorder, the malady that's killing off our honeybees. But apparently not:

A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

....“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

This is not good. I didn't realize we were still so deeply in the dark about the cause of this.

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Here's one for the picky eaters in the crowd: The FDA recommends consuming 2,000 calories a day. You probably eat a variety of different foods to get to that total. But what if you were to eat only one? How much would you need to eat of a given food to get to 2,000? Buzzfeed has the answer:

HT Grist.

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The Washington Post reports on "possible common ground" between Obama and congressional Republicans on cutting Medicare costs:

In particular, participants say, the president told House Republicans that he was open to combining Medicare’s coverage for hospitals and doctor services....Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, proposed much the same in a speech in February.

....While Mr. Cantor’s proposal got little attention at the time, its echo by Mr. Obama hints at a new route toward compromise — in contrast with the budget that House Republicans passed this month that has no chance of Senate approval.

That sounds like a mighty small area of agreement to me. Any port in a storm, I suppose, but it's a little hard to see how this leads to any kind of larger bargain.

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