James Bullard, the President of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, has become the second regional bank President in the last couple months to endorse the concept of breaking up large banks.

The public has a thirst for a real crackdown on Wall Street. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, in the 48 hours since it went out with a petition in support of a new Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial and investment banking received 60,000 signatures, and counting. But it’s not just arcane subjects about permitted practices by financial firms that has animated people. Eric Griego, a Democrat running for the House in New Mexico, released an ad this week with the line “I won’t stop until Wall Street bankers who broke the law go to jail.” The ad starts with the story of Alan and Melinda Witt who lost a good deal of their life savings in the stock market during the 2008 crash, right as they had planned to retire.

The $2 billion “Fail Whale” trade has morphed into a $3 billion loss – and counting. The trade is still being unwound, so we aren’t yet sure about the final losses. What we do know more today is about the massive size of the trade.

Bruno Iskil, the infamous “London Whale,” will leave JPMorgan Chase in the wake of his soured “Fail Whale” trades which lost the bank $2 billion to date. Experts are pointing out the dangers of allowing a casino-like hedge funds inside a federal insured bank.

The issues of housing policy and Wall Street criminality have not appeared at the top of the agenda in the Presidential campaign, certainly not among horse race journalists. But new polling shows that this is a major challenge for the President, who is viewed as having failed on housing and foreclosure policy, and as too lenient on Wall Street.

In addition to asking Jeff Merkley about filibuster reform, I sought his reaction to the Fail Whale trades that have racked up massive losses at JPMorgan Chase. Merkley, along with Carl Levin, authored the Volcker rule, the ban on most types of proprietary trading, that made its way into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. There has been a lot of slippage on the rules, however, once they left Congress and made their way through the regulatory gauntlet.

Ally Bank, formerly known as GMAC Mortgage, the nation’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer, put its mortgage subsidiary Residential Capital into bankruptcy. This is part of a continuing effort on the part of Ally, which is still majority-owned by the US government, to escape its mortgage liabilities. But what does it mean for the foreclosure fraud settlement, to which Ally is a signatory?

Whale trade, proponents of stiffer regulation on Wall Street than what was ushered in with Dodd-Frank have offered a variety of solutions, including reenacting Glass Steagal or making banks smaller. All of them could be beneficial in tandem to reduce risk and political influence from the financial system.

Three JPMorgan Chase executives will take the fall for the “Fail Whale” trades that have so far cost the firm $2 billion. But Bruno Iskil, the actual London Whale, so far still has a job, for some reason, as does Jamie Dimon, the CEO who has been on an apology tour for his lack of awareness of the trading losses.

In the wake of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion Fail Whale trade and the ensuing federal investigation into violations of disclosure laws, US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has called on JPM CEO Jamie Dimon to resign from his position on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The announcement brings to light the fact that bank executives control most of the positions at the regional banks, and they select the Fed regional presidents that help to set monetary policy for the nation.