While action last week by three federal agencies requiring “too big to fail” banks to bulk up their reserves is encouraging, we continue to support legislation sponsored by U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and David Vitter, R-La., that unequivocally give such requirements the force of law.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered big U.S. banks to cap their borrowing at 20 times their total assets. The order also expands the definition of assets used to calculate a bank’s leverage and would require the banks to be in compliance by 2018.

Banks that were “too big to fail” were in the headlines during and after the financial crisis of 2008. The federal government pumped billions of dollars in bailout money to some of the banks because the alternative would have been a meltdown.