It's likely that more than one bank would face potential failure during any crisis, he said, which would further complicate efforts to gracefully collapse a giant bank. "We've made almost no progress on ending too big to fail," he said.

Dimon dismisses such concerns as "chatter" and says U.S. banks need heft to meet the needs of their globally active clients. Since 2007, the bank has added more than 80,000 workers, equal to the current combined payrolls of Nike Inc. and Colgate Palmolive Co.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Dimon said JPMorgan will spend almost $3 billion "over the next few years" and devote 3,000 full-time employees to complying with regulations that arose from the crisis.

That regulatory burden could promote further industry consolidation, according to Wilbur Ross, chairman of WL Ross & Co., a private-equity firm.

"We think the little tiny banks, the 90-odd percent of banks that are under $1.5 billion in deposits, are pretty much an obsolete phenomenon," he told Bloomberg Television on March 14. "We think they'll all have to merge with each other, be acquired by bigger banks or something."

Implicit Guarantee

Jake Siewert, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, and Mary Eshet, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, declined to comment. Spokesmen for JPMorgan and Citigroup didn't respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

Even with policy makers' claims that the next crisis will be handled differently, investors still regard the largest banks as protected by an implicit government guarantee. One sign of that attitude is that investors continue to demand from the biggest banks lower interest payments in return for deposits.

That gives larger banks a funding advantage over their smaller rivals. In 2011, funding costs for banks with more than $10 billion in assets were about one-third less than for the smallest banks, according to the FDIC. That gap was only slightly narrower than the 37 percent advantage the largest banks enjoyed when Dodd-Frank was signed.

$250 Billion Boost

For 28 global banks in 2009, that benefit translated into a cumulative $250 billion, according to Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England's executive director for financial stability.

"Markets have come to believe that what the government did in 2008 and 2009 isn't a one-time deal, that the government will somehow come to the rescue of these big financial firms," Kevin Warsh, a former member of the Fed's Board of Governors, said on the March 28 "Charlie Rose" TV show.