PERSPECTIVE ECONOMY AND FINANCE TOO BIG TO FAIL: STILL A PROBLEM A look at development finance Duncan Lindo March 2022 Too-big-to-fail(TBTF) financial firms are still with us and are heavily implicated in a chronic financial drain of hundreds of billions of dollars a year from developing to developed countries. Dominating developing countries in scale, scope and influence, they profit from but don’t meet the needs of developing countries. They amplify problems of over in­debtedness, volatility, costly borrowing and reserve building, and they enable and facilitate illicit financial flows and tax evasion. TBTF finance is headquartered and regulated in the global North. More than ten years after the crisis they are still our problem and working people in the Global North and in the Global South suffer as a result.