Big banks still pose a threat to the world financial system because there is a general assumption that governments will come to their rescue in case of trouble, an International Monetary Fund executive said on Thursday. "It is astonishing that officials in countries are still largely ill-equipped to deal with a Lehman Brothers-style bankruptcy, where assets and liabilities are scattered across multiple jurisdictions and entities," Jose Vinals, tasked with financial oversight at the IMF, said in a blog post. The 2008 bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers marked the height of the global credit crisis, and many of the reforms that have since been implemented were aimed at preventing a repeat of such a collapse. During the financial crisis, a number of the world's big banks were bailed out by governments with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. "The not-so-good news is that, despite these efforts, implicit subsidies to these systemically important financial institutions
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