On Tuesday, CBI director general John Cridland said taking action to reform banks now would be “barking mad”.
But Cable said it was “disingenuous in the extreme” to warn reform could damage economic recovery, the Times reports.
Ensuring taxpayers are not liable for any future losses or bank collapses and ring-fencing banks’ retail operations are among recommendations.
Anxieties about the big financial institutions were “all the more reason for grappling with this issue”, Cable told the Times.
He said: “It is disingenuous in the extreme to use the current context to argue against reform.
“Banks are in a way trying to create a panic around something which they know has got to happen.
“The governor of the Bank of England and many other people have been arguing that we have to deal with the too-big-to-fail problem.
“We can’t have big global banks with balance sheets bigger than British GDP underwritten by the taxpayer; this can’t go on and it has got to be dealt with.”
