With the announcement of record Wall Street bonus pools and rising credit card fees, it is time to sit back and see where we go from here.

In the wake of the near collapse of the US financial sector one year ago, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke took extraordinary measures to avert collapse. Turning caution to the wind, they arranged shotgun mergers, decided who would live and who would die, and brought the word trillions into our every day vocabulary. By the time they were done, the landscape of American banking was transformed. Today, the six banking organizations that received $160 billion -- JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, and the former investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- are now looking to a future in which they can dominate the financial services landscape.

But perhaps the term financial services is misleading in this context. After all, as bank earnings reports were rolled out for the most recent quarter and news headlines announced the record bonus pools that the banks were preparing to pay, it became clear that the